The Empire of Love

Toward

Th,eory

of Intimacy, Geralogy, and, Carnality

Elizabeth A. povinelli

DUKE UNIVEBSITY PRESS Durhnm an, London zoo6

Empires of Love: An Introduction

relations to a singular kind or scale of power, to analog description, or rumor. The frustration i's that this kind of project

is doomed-and rightly so-before it can begin fo several reasons, not the least ofwhich are: that the concrete linkages
between forms of love and forms of governance are too many
and too dispersed to be of much use for a theoretical or practical political anthropology; that rhe way I am conceptualizing

love, intimac and sociality removes this work from the very

field it seeks to address; and that we can never agree about the referent of liberalism. Indeed, there are many ways that

could frame this study-as a study about sexualit sovereignt death and life worlds, and new social imaginaries. So
what am I trying to do, and why?
Perhaps the first thing to note is that this book is
a

theoreti-

cal reflection, but it is also the product of my own experiences

in what would appear to be two very different social worlds: on the one hand, the social worlds of indigenous men and
women living at Belyuen, a small community in the North-

tices of intimacy are found in each, especially as these modes

of intimacy move us beyond the choice between freedom and

ern Territory of Australia, and its hinterlands; and, on the other, the social worlds.of progressive queers in the United
States who identify as or with radical faeries. In many ways
these two worlds are incommensurate, the one based on

constraint. Thus this book is not interested in the study of identities so much as it is interested in the social matrix out of which these identities and their divisions emerge, including: where and what sexuality is; where and when a person is
a

thick

token ofa type ofsocial

identit for instance, an indigenous

kinship and face-to-face socialities, the other on stranger sociality. And in many ways the various members within these
two worlds would seem to misuse each other. Some indilenous people with whom I am quite close reject homosexuality
as a legitimate mode of social life; some progressive queers are uncritically culturally appropriative. For the past twenty

person or an "indigenous person"; which forms of intimate dependency count as freedom and which count as undue social constraint; which forms of intimacy involve moral judgment rather than mere choice; and which forms of intimate

I have moved back and forth between these two worlds and across the racial and sexual discourses that locate me most self-evidently within one of them, no matter how my
years personal history might locate me within the other. The incom-

sociality distribute life and material goods and evoke moral certaint if not moral sanctimoniousness. This approach to intimacy and governance does not collapse these two worlds;

mensurate nature of these social worlds and of the racial and sexual discourses that apprehend them make it difficult for me to do such normal things as express joy and grief in one

world for the people I have found and lost in another and for me to make sense of my insertion in either.

No matter this incommensurabilit I have come to see these two worlds as vitally related. This book attempts to explain why by critically exploring how the liberal, binary concepts of individual freedom and social constraint-concepts

it does not make them two vesions of the same thing. Instead it allows us to see how their differences emerge diagonally to the deafening drum of liberal flgurations of freedom and its others and their acial and civilizational inflections. The second thing to note is that this is an essa a trial, an attempt to provide some preliminary flesh to an intuition about how a set of ethical and normative claims about the governance of love, socialit and the body circulateinliberal
settl,er colonies

in such a way that life and death, rights and recognition, goods and resources are unevenly distributed there. I examine how discourses of individual freedom and social

constraint-what I refer to as utological and genealogi,cal

imaginaries-animate and enflesh love, sociality, and bodies;
how they operate as strategic maneuvers ofpower whose purpose

that were continually pressed on me

across these

as

I moved back and foth

worlds-contribute to the ways that intimacy in

these two worlds is apprehended and what alternative prac-

or result

-is

to distribute life, goods, and values across

social space; and how they contribute to the hardiness ofliber-

normative horizon. In previously published papers, as well as in talks and conferences, I have referred to these
as a

alism

in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its mobility."2It
is thus for the intimate event and the genealogi-

a body rotates. This axis is not fixed

discourses in a variety of ways, mainly by the terms ,.inti-

macy" and "genealogy|' In this little book, I use the terms "autological subject" and "genealogical society,' and,.inti-

cal society. These are not rules that can be defined outside of their practice of usage, removed from the chain of questions and ansrvers that invest them with sense and truth, nonsense and falsit or held frxed by some property internal to them. Instead, the intimate event and genealogical society are
the phantasmagorical axis cast by discourses about individual

to specific aspects of liberal sociality. By the autologicl subject, I am referring to discourses, practices, and fantadies about self-making, selfsovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional
democracy and capitalism. By genealogical society,I am refe-

mate event" and "intimacy" to refer

freedom and social constraint.

we must

It is to these discourses that

of the phan-

turn to understand the real world effects

ring to discourses, practices, and fantasies about social constraints placed on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances. The intirnate et)ent) as opposed to intirnacy, is simply the way in which the event of normative love is formed at the intersection-and crisis of these two discourses.r
These defrnitions are meant to be no more than the mini-

toms rather than to a set of unworldly rules and definitions. What I argue in this book, what I try ro show through a series of ethnographic, juridical, and historical readings, is that these discourses and their material anchors are a key means by which people in liberal setiler colonies articulate their most intimate relations to their most robust governmen-

mal groundwork on which the following discussion can begin to be built. In his late notes, published in rhe volume On Cer-

tal and economic institutions, make sense of how others do the same, account for the internal incoherence of these discourses, and distribute life and death internationally. Autological and genealogical discourses are not in this view different in kind even though they are used to differentiate kinds

tainty,Ludwig Wittgenstein calls on but never defines the concept of a language game. And how could he, when these meditations argue that even a rule is merely the effect of a chain of questions and answers that make sense and nonsense, an

ofpeople, societies, and civilizational orders. They both presuppose a liberal humanist claim that what makes us most
human is our capacity to base our most intimate relations, our most robust governmental institutions, and our economic relations on mutual and free recognition of the worth and value of another person, rather than basing these connections on, for example, social status or the bare facts ofthe body. These

inherited background against which we distinguish between truth and falsity. Sounding a bit like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thotuand Plnteaus,Wittgenstein writes, ..I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can d,iscouer them subsequently like the axis around which

presuppositions circulate through the subjects and institu-

tions of liberal settler colonies, informing how people talk about themselves and others, how they govetn themselves and others, and who they think they are or who they think
they should be. As people go about their ordinary lives

Because the following ethnographic, legal, and historical

practices of love, work, and civic

life-they continually

rheir
con-

I am calling carrwlity:, the socially built space between flesh and environment. I distingui sh corporealty from car_
that nality in terms of the difference between flesh
as a

readings are oiented to discourse s and thdr- material anchors, I am especially interested in an aspect of social life

stitute these discourses as

juridical

the dcourse.s were the agents of

social life, as ifthere were such a thing as the sovereign subject and the genealogical societ as individual freedom and social constraint, and as if the choice between these Manicheah

and political maneuver and flesh as a physical mattering forth

of these maneuvers. What I am claiming, and try to show throughout this book, is that the uneven constitution of the
flesh is not merely an effect of a liberal biopolitics, or merely the disciplinary means by which the discourses of autology and genealogy are secured, maintained, and reproduced, but
also an independent, unruly vector at. play within these bio_

positions were the only real choice available to us. They do this as ifall other actual and potential positions and practices
were impractical, politically perverse, or

socia! aberrant.

As an alternative to this way of practicing and analyzing intimac this book explores a number of immanent dependencies among indigenous and queer people I know, some of which emerge from actual human encounters within and between these groups, some of which emerge from the legal and

politics. In other words, the flesh may be an effect of these discourses but it is not reducible to them. To make sense is
to shape, etch, and engenre discourse as much as it is to di_ rect and frame physicalities, fabicate habitudes, habituate vision, and leave behind new material habitats that will be called on to replicate, justif def and interfere with given
sense-making and with the distibution of life and death, wealth and povert that this sense-making makes possible.

medical regulations that members of these groups encounter, and some of which emerge from the material and affective dynamics that are artifacts of these encounters. Thinking of the social relations within and among the people I know as immannnt depend.encis allows me to dislodge certain commonsense

views of the social matrix of indigenous and queer people

In this way I am merely following a line of thought stretch_ ing from Althusser's attempt to locate ideology in practice
to Deleuze's attempt to produce a radical pragmatics of the body. Contemporary citical theory has attempted to model
the material of all social mediation without reducing this material mediation to the same mode, the same qualities of dura-

in

which the dependencies of indigenous persons are so saturated by determination that the immanent is only a sign of
the breakdown of the indigenous order and in which the dependencies of queer persons are so annulled by portraits of
stranger sociality that dependency itself is hard to imagine.

bility, transposibilit and detachability or the same level of

force, intentionality, and efficacy. Thus, this bookis less inter_

socialit and the bod and more interested in their forms, frts, materialities,
moorings, anchors, and landings.

ested in the meaning and semantics of love,

In

short book on the psychosomatics ofFreudian psycho_

Talking about bodies and mateialities as actual fleshy things can produce strong ambivalence among feminists,
queer theorists, and progressive scholafs in part because it is assumed that to mention bodies and their materialities is to forget that these are always stretching, reacting, and form_ ing their physiology in the domain of discourse. Furthe it would seem to forget that even ifthere were flesh on one siile and discourse on the other, neither of these sides is singular, homogeneous, or reducible to a singular axis. What flesh, where and when? And which discourse, where and when?

analysis, Elizabeth Wilson elaborates nicely on what is at stake here when she reflects on what Freud might have meant by

the term "obligation." Freud wrote, in relation to his theory of neurasthenic melancholia, that the .,associated neurones
are obliged to give up their excitation, which produtes pain.,,g

Wilson asks, "What is the character of the psychosomatic

structure such that soma and psyche are bound by obligation rathe than unilateral control,, and such that a binding re_ lation, a mutuality of cause, influence and orientation, is at_

tributed to non-human agents?a What Mlson suggests, and

what is conceptually useful here, is that Freud is attempting to sketch a system of governance in which the mutual consti-

The multiplicity of discourses wound into any one object

meets the multiplicity of the object as it changes over time, is stretched by any given discourse, and winds others as it twists away from them. The aim of my emphasis on the physical matter of the body-the ways discourses leave bodies behind

tution ofsoma and psyche, flesh and discourse, are no longer

captured by the usual mechanics of ,,cause and effect, origin and derivation."s They are instead the literal material of each other, different from each other but mutually obliged rarher than caused or affected, aulrcrablc to ralher than suhject of.6

them in a certain condition-is neither to reach the fact of

the flesh as opposed to discourse, no to establish a discursive

I want to show how the flesh-the creation of life-worlds, death-worlds, and rotting worlds-is a key way in which autolog genealog and their intimacies are felt, known, and
uneven distribution of the expressed. The dynamic between carnalityand the discourses

separation offlesh and self. Instead,

ForWilson, the point of reading Freud in this way is to break through a certain esistance in feminist theory to consider the
physiological aspects ofpsychological process, not to reduce psyche to soma or soma to psyche, but to map the strange

of the autological subject and the genealogical society is in this sense more like a skein than a skin-like a length of yarn
or thread wound loosely and coiled together, a flock of bids flying across the sky in a line, or a tangled or complex mass of material.

elasticity of each as it finds itself obligated by the orher_a leg obligated to a psychic paralysis, psyche ro rhe pain of a hysterical facial tic. In seeking to resist the choice between individual freedom and social determinatio4 as the only foundation for governing

body-a choice presented as natural, vital, and irreplaceable in liberal settle colonies-the aspira_ tion of this little book is not so different from the biopolitical

love, socialit and the

project that Michel Foucault outlined over a quarter ofa cen-

tury

ago.7

As we know, the point of his histories of sexuality

how we go about studying sexuality and the social imaginary. My original motivation for writing this book was to address what

(as well as of his histories of the ness) was

clinic, the prison, and madnot to study discourses of sexualit for example, for

saw as a certain

literalism ofthe referent hover-

the sake ofknowing sexuality but for the sa\e ofinvestigating power and the discursive matrixes that underpinned it. Simi-

ing over Euro-American studies of sexuality as they opened themselves to their transnational conditions. We were witness-

larl

the aspiration was not merely to know how power disci-

plined sexualit sexual expression, or sexual identity, but to

understand how all of these were the means by which power in
a

robust sense-power over life and death, power to cripple

ing, I thought, an example of what Judith Butler described as the disciplinary function of the "proper object.,'B The study of "womanr" "Third-World women," "rrrenr" "the third sex," "new masculinitiesr" "gay worlds," "lesbian worldsr,, and "straight worlds," and the globalization of the heterohomo binary were considered to be the proper object ofschol11

and rot certain worlds while over-investing others with wealth

hope-is produced, reproduced, and distributed when we seem to be doing nothing more than kissing our lovers
and
goodbye as we leave for the day.

ars, academic programs, and activists who study sexuality and gender as transnational phenomena. Progressive politics
and scholarship addressing, for example, indigenous worlds, the international division of labor, emergent Islamic theocracies and reformations, fundamentalist Christian social poli-

It is at the intersection of questions of power and exploitation that my approach to love, sociality, and the body and my
approach to liberalism converge. In this book, Iove, intimacy, and sexuality are not about desire, pleasure, or sex per se, but

tics, postcolonial racializations, and other aspects of social life not explicitly self-characterizing as sexuality or gender
per se tend to enter sexuality studies either through a grammar of concatenation or through a transformational grammar

about things like geography, history,

culpabilit and obliga-

tion; the extraction of wealth and the distribution of life and

death; hope and despair; and the seemingly self-evident fact and value of freedom. So, when

speak of love and its soci-

of pleasure, desire, and sexual identity. What do I mean by grammars of "concatenation" and "transformation',? Something quite simple. Either gender and sexuality are added to nominalized social phenomena (so we get race and sexuality or indigeneity and gender) or an aspect ofsocial life is treated
transformed by sex and gender-as being sexualized, feminized, or engendered.
as

alities, I am referring to the processes by which the dialectic

ofindividual freedom and social bondage is distributed geographically, how social phenomena that contest this distribution are made commensurate with it, and how discourses that arise from this distribution circulate, are localized, and are
contested.

Approaching the international division of life and death

Some conservative ritics, and others just outright hostile to sexuality studies, have seized on the distance between social phenomena that have an obvious relationship to sexuality

in liberal settler colonies in this way would, I think, change

and gender and those that have

more attenuated relationship

to the same in order to accuse queer theorists and feminists

of

enmental heart of capitalism, secularism, civil societ and new and old religiosities.ro
For all the good these studies have done, and I think that they have done tremendous good, this book investigates what happens when we move away from a language of trespass where it is based on grammars of concatenation and trans-

making linkages and intersections between phenomena based

on nothing more than their own theoretically over-heated

and slightly salacious minds. Forexample, although scholar!

books on sexuality have had a certain ommercial success in

university presses, scholars of sexual studies frnd it increasingly hard to support their research.e This is just fine from the point of view of conservative critics. For them,

formation, without capitulating to the conservative demand that feminist and sexuality theorists either simply go away
or define more narrowly their domain of study.rl Rather than

if

sexu-

ality studies and gender studies have a place at the table of scholarship, it is on condition that they discipline their object
and not ovetstep their proper domain. To be sure, the call for

narrowing the field of study, I am advocating a far more robust model of "sexuality" which would examine the distributive linkages among the social struggles of indigenous Australians, queer Americans, and others by more than mere
metaphor, by more than the conjunctive "and," or a quasi-

carefully differentiating various kinds of social strugglesracial struggles from queer struggles and both from indigenous struggles-has not come only from conservative critics

within and outside the academy. As recent debates over samesex marriage in the United States and over gender parity in
France (lc Mouaemnt pour ln pari) suggest, progressive academics and critics may see the social foundations and dynam-

universal economy of pleasure and desire. In short, I want to suggest a different way of approaching love, intimacy, and
sexuality in the wake of settler colonialism that includes how various subjects of liberal diasporic sexuality have resisted the pervasive politics of cultural recognition.

ics of queer, feminist, and racial demands for cultural civil rights to be utterly distinct. These conservative and progres-

right, in one sense. Contemporary sexuality studies and gender studies have engaged in what we might call a politics of tresposs. They have refused to sequester, to
sive critics are ghettoize, women's issues, gender issues, and queer issues to
a subset

Two

One serious impediment to the project I am proposing is the

phantom-like nature of liberalism itself. Libealism is not a thing. It is a moving target developed in the European empire and used to secure power in the contemporary world. It is
located nowhere but in its continual citation as the motivating

ofsocial life. The best ofthese trespass studies have

demonstrated decisively how discourses and practices ofgender and sexuality are critical to the maintenance of liberal and

illiberal forms of power and domination and are at the gov-

logic and aspiration of dispersed and competing social and cultural experiments. The same can be said of the liberal dis-

courses this book is tracking. Individual freedom, social constraint, autolog genealogy, the intimate event: These are not

tightly dependent on the ability ofthese discourses and their

material institutions to transform the world into an image of its own normative horizon. In other words, these discourses

things but moving targets. When, for instance, does the event of intimate love actually happen? What are the criteria we use to decide whether this event has happened? One thing I want to show is that, as a result ofthe strategic shape-shifting part_ nership ofautology and genealog discourses ofthe autological subject, the genealogical societ and their putative modes
of intimacy are at best incommensurate discourses, multiple

must, and do, continually change the facts on the ground. Though these discourses may not have had any substantial hold in many places to which they initially referred, over
time the actual material and discursive conditions of places change to meet and mirror the presumptions of these dis-

rather than singular; they are undecidable and, at times, incoherent events. Although they are used to distinguish social and civilizational oders on which they themselves are depen_
dent, they are, at the same time, destabilized and invaginated by the very sites they seek to discipline. They describe neither
the actual worlds ofliberalism nor the actual worlds ofothers.

first was a misrepresentation becomes an accurate description. Instead of asking, where are the discourses? we might ask, what is being done to produce the
courses. What at

world in their image? The dynamic transformation of the

facts on the ground is not merely a transformation of social values, economy, and political institutions, but the transfor-

mation of life-forces, of ecology and environment, of disease

trajectories. However,
as

Rather than studying liberalism,

want to understand how

much as these discourses change the

these discourses and their material anchors act as a means

of

moving among an array of disparate and multidimensional, multifunctional phenomena; a means of organizing these dis_
parate phenomena into a definite relation of values and
a

material-subjective grounds of social life, because they are written into different kinds of materials-human bodies, ecojust

thing

called Liberalism; and a means of making other kinds of so_ cial phenomena commensurate or incommensurate, comparable o incomparable with this phantom Liberalism.

logical landscapes, and analogical and digital texts to name three-the ground itself is extraordinarily dynamic, with multiple rhlthms and complex coordinations. These material
dynamics continually cast autological and genealogical dis-

courses into a spectral realm, halfway between being and becomrng.

The mysterious "now you see it, now you don't,, quality ofdiscourses ofautology and genealogy derives in part from two kinds of performativity. On the one hand, the fantasy of Liberalism is tightly associated with the fantasy of the performative subject, a point I elaborate on more fully in the last essay. On the other hand, the fantasy of Liberalism is

And

so this book runs headflrst

into the serious question

of how to wite an account of a historical formation without fe-

tishizing that formation, without abstracting it from its immanent social contexts, and without collapsing the social reality
of that formation into ideological accounts of that formation.

Where do we look to find discourses of autolog genealog

and their intimacies if we are truly committed to studying their inter-digitation and immanence in processes of circula-

intimac and their material anchors emerged from European Empire as a mode and maneuver of domination
modes of

and exploitation and continue to operate as such. This book

tion and processes of localization rather than merely engaging in a comparative study? Where to look if we ae to study
them as interdependent discourses ather than as compatative ones? Where to look if we see the objects of comparison as emergent in these circulations rather than as concrete,

claims that the intimate couple is a key transfer point between, on the one hand, liberal imaginaries of contractual
ecnomics, politics, and sociality and, on the other, liberal forms of power in the contemporary world. Love, as an intimate event, secures the self-evident good of social institutions, social distributions oflife and death, and social respon-

bounded units that are circulating? Are these discourses operating at a particular scale ofsociality? Are they only in certain
sorts of institutions, only in certain regimes of disciplinarity?

sibilities for these institutions and distributions. If you want

to locate the hegemonic home of liberal logics and aspirations,

Or are they more ubiquitous, secreted in practices that seem

to have nothing to do with love? To answer these kinds ofquestions we need to ask, first, what constitutes the borders, interi-

look to love in settle colonies. the intimate couple is a key transfer point within liberalism, this couple is already conditioned by liberalism's
emergence and dispersion in empire.

If

ors, and dynamics of autolog genealogyr, and intimac and

At the same time that

their relation with other objects. What are the conditions of

circulation placed on these discourses, what are their habitats
and habitudes, what are the dnsities oftheir interconnectivi-

people spread the good news of the singular world-historic value of these freedom-producing subjects and institutions, they claim this singular heritage for the North Atlantic and Western Europe. Such claims may seem particularly loud in

ties such that a culture of ciculation comes to be the general equivalent, resisted only with great risk? What are the barri
cades and incentives to their circulation and its effects? How are populations constituted and stabilized by such circula-

British settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, and the

United States. But,
as

with the concpt of the colonial subject,

so with the referent of the liberal settler

colony-the reach

tions? W'ho takes and is assigned responsibility for the effecrs

ofthese circulations?

of settler colonialism stretches way beyond the self-evident site of colonial settlement itself. As \V. E. B. Du Bois long
ago insisted, the location of the United States and Europe and their economic and discursive wealth, capital, and po-

Three

The strong argument of this book is that the social imaginaries of the autological subject, the genealogical societ their

litical power was not self-evitlent and was certainly not anchored in their own borders.D Nor are the effects of Western accumulation of economic and discursive capital felt solely

within the offshoots of Western Europe and the North Atlantic, a point that Dipesh Chakrabarty has more recently elaborated on in Prouincializing Europe. For this reason, the referent of liberal settl,er colonies is much wider than nation-states

literally founded on the basis of colonial settlement, encompassing what I sometimes describe as the liberal dsporaan origin-less or origin-obscuring process of transformation

in circulation that retroactively constitutes its beginning and

center.l3

Europe's economic, discursive, and political power was

begged, borrowed, and stolen from subjects ofempire, then twisted and turned to a Western advantage. Empire created

facing this book, then, is trying to capture and explore both sides of the governance of love, socialit and the body in liberal settler colonies-its disciplinary effecrs and its disciplinary failures in the face of a set of social refusals. After all, if
the discourses

nacy ofthese discourses, they are extraordinarily productive and mobile. The exact articulation among elements within the dynamic of individual freedom and social constraint can radi_ cally shift shapes even as the self_evident nature ofthis oppo_ sition is irself conserved. one of the difficult tasks

and circulated povert trauma, and dearh,globally wbile claiming to create and foster wealth, happiness, and life,

and imaginaries of individual freedom and sociar constraint remain surprisingly resilient and absorptive in settler colo_ nies, they do so in spite of multiple heterogeneous challenges to their legitimacy in local worlds. One of the most pressing questions we face is how the challenges of these atual_world heterogeneous ways of living are subdued and redirected, or not; why they have such a hard time becoming expansive alternatives-or why they may not wish to be so. In the first and second chapters, therefore, I return these discourses of the intimate event and the genealogical society to the thick actual worlds from which they were pulled.

it claimed a universal origin and end even as it was partial about its values and goals. Part of the way particuand

lar colonial regimes secured their universal claims was to absorb local languages and life-worlds. This absorption was not, however, seamless. The history of absorption filled liberalism's institutions and discourses with jagged edges and
very fine cracks, cleavages, and fissures that marked the nontranslation ofdiscursive orders, ideal norms, and actual practices, that is, the various ways bodies were left behind. As a result, the more life-worlds and languages that liberal insti-

Though I am reflecting on the ca!ture of sociality in liberal settler colonies through queer and indigenous commu_
and in_ digenous forms of sociality per se, but rather to show the co_ constitution of worlds where before we saw sepatate popula_ tions, dynamics, and problematics. I hope that this approach allows us to see new forms of life that contest, elaborate, or ignore these discourses, and how these new forms of life do,

tutions and discourses absorbed, the more the tensions and

contradictions between its ideal image and its actual practice
increased, while suspicion grew that liberalism was an inco-

nities, this is not intended as a comparative study.ra I do not attempt to illuminate comparative aspects of queer

herent, ideology-driven system of exploitation.

No matter the

multiplicit

incoherence, and indetermi-

or do not, disrupt deep channels of exploitation and domination. In short, I hope to open up a social politics that goes beyond saying yes or no to the intimate event and the gene-

alogical society by cutting across these fields of regularity' This said, the ethnographic ground of this book comes from two very different social worlds and two very different kinds of experience on my part. My discussion of the indigenous northwest coast is based on twenty years during which I have lived and traveled at least a month or two a year there (along
20

And yet for all this complexit in the end, I think what makes the approach I am advocating in this set of essays dif_ ficult is not the density of the thought or the partiality of the object, but the absence of any clean moral or political
stance toward any piece of the lives I discuss. My goal is not to say yes or no to individual freedom and social constraint,

the intimate event or the genealogical society. All I can hope is that by understanding how these discouses work to shape social life, we can begin to formulate a positive political pro_
is increased to meet the density of actual social worlds. The goal
is not to produce a hermeneutics of the Self and Other, but to

with much longer, year-length trips, at several points). Generall indigenous communities absorb strangers into local languages of kinship and moiety relations. This certainly was the
case when

gram-something I have begun to describe as a politics of "thick life"-in which the density of social representation

I first arrived at Belyuen in 1984. There, kinship rehow various kinds,of kin are
are the presumed backdrop of every relationship of

lations-with speciflc norms for

treated

shatter the foundations on which this supposedly simple re_

lay of apprehension has historically established a differential

any longstanding nature. I will, therefore, often refer to vari-

of power as a differential of knowledge.

ous people from Belyuen and beyond as my mother, sister, husband, brother, et cetera. This is not merely an issue of reference, however. Part ofwhat

I am exploring in this book is

are made real and fic-

Four

where,

wh and how these relations

tive forms of kinship. I have spent much less time living and traveling with men, and some women, who identify as radical faeries. Moreover, the ways strangers are absorbed into radical faerie communities and publics are quite different from the ways strangers are absorbed into indigenous communities. Thus, alongside my examination of how, wh and where indigenous-nonindigenous relations of kinship are figured as real or frctive, is another: what are the legal, economic, and social dynamics between these two foms of social absorption?

in which liberal discourses of freedom and constraint

have organized this book to replicate and tackle the ways and

intimacy and governance discipline the immanent nature of social dependencies in settler colonies. The book consists of three essays, each of which maps a different network of lib_
eral love, intimac and sociality and liberal governance and each of which presents somewhat different narrative styles and strategies. Though different in tone and archive, the chap_

ters of the book are best understood as a loop that begins with ethnographically thick accounts of the governance of

bodies across settler colonies-Australia, the United States,

genealogy make and unmake the voices and bodies of my in-

and Canada along with the indigenous and queer worlds found there-and ends with a general account of the discourses of the intimate event and the genealogical society as an epiphenomenon to the dialectic of individual freedom
and social constraint, its dynamic relationship to carnalit its ideological borders, its internal incoherence, and its techniques of commensuration.

digenous friends and family even though these discourses do not describe the contours oftheir actual social worlds and relations eaen where th,ese relatiotts cn be d,escribed as relations
of kinship- The purpose of this chaprer is to make visible how

the disciplinary operation ofthese discourses is lodged in the

deep tissue

tation and practice.

a

-the

background conditions

of social interpre-

tropical ulcer that I contracted in the far north of Australia and how it was medica! treated in the United States, Canada, and Australia. This physical
The flrst chapter pivots on

The weight of the second chapter falls on the other side ofthe discipline ofindividual freedom and social consrraint.

condition would seem to have little to do with love, intimac or sexuality. But the sore provides me with a way of making visible a set of interpenetrating legal, cultural, and medical disciplines of the body that presuppose and entail the forms of the autological subject and the genealogical societ their disciplinary modes of intimacy and socialit and their carnal
anchorings. The suggestion is that the operation of these discourses is weakest where it is most apparent, most tenacious where we would never dream

I track the disciplinary effects of discourses of autology and genealogyinthe experimental socialworlds of friends of mine who identify as radical faeries and their allies. To do so, I first outline some of the thickly contested aspirational and practical horizons that constitute the "radical,faeries" as a social genre. The point is to demonstrate that there is not "a" radical faerie movement, but rather a set of allegiances
to
a

moving and contested set of qualities and stances toward

it could

be organizing bodies,

their authorized voicing, and circulations. In other words, the sore gives me some traction in making sense of how the discourses of autology and genealog and the different intimacies they presuppose and demand, are reproduced not merely

in domains explicitly identified as love or sexual, but in domains having seemingly little or nothing to do with love, intimacy, or sexuality per se and everything to do with who can
be free without harm. The chapter focuses on how, through a

normative masculinity and sociality. The motivating question of the chapter is, then, Why and how do legal, public, cultural, and many progressive indigenous activists intern this eclectic counter-public within a particular negative model of intimacy and sexuality? To this end, I then place these practices of social making in the contested interior terrain of the faerie movement, the critical indigenous public, and the jurisprudence of religious certification and cultural copyright. I examine how discourses ofthe autological subject and the genealogical society interpret these social worlds as mere ideological cover for illicit sex acts, as mere appro-

politics of cultural recognition and sensitivity, discourses of

priation of other people's culture, or as seriouSly intended but legally dubious modes of religiosity. The essay ends by trying to understand how the disciplining of radical faeries
through
a

and are still being reflgured, divested, and diverted. To a cer-

tain extent I am agnostic about the local historical details of the emergence of the intimate event in Empire, choosing instead to move from a theoretical argument to a historical re-

discourse offreedom paradoxically reanimates the

self-evident good of liberal democratic forms of freedom and how, in this context, a politics of espionage emerges as the

thinking-how my argument about the intimate event and

the genealogical society would recast the typical ways we have

foil of the cunning of recognition. As in the frrst chapter, my discussion of this social genre is not merely discursive, if by
discursive we mean the play of signs outside their material

written the history of the enlightenment and its core social institutions and dynamics.
One last thing. As much as this book describes various tactics of intimacy and sociality emerging diagonally to lib-

inhabitations. Even

as

radical faeries are creatively coordinat-

ing a social identity made sensible in and by an entire freld ofpossible social positions and practices, they are also physi-

ca! and affectively made and haunted by these makings.

The last chapter is an extended theoretical meditation on
the discursive terrain of the intimate event and the genealogi-

eral discourses of individual freedom and social constraint, this book does not present a redemptive narative. I do not

25

think these practices

are redemptive, for at least two reasons.

cal society.

It

First, the options presented to those persons who choose, or must, live at the end of liberalism's tolerance and capitalism's

seeks to provide a thicker description ofthese

trickle, are often not great options. To pretend they are is to

ignore the actual harms that liberal forms of social tolerance and capital forms of life- and wealth-extraction produce. Second, to wish for a redemptive narrative, to seek it, is to wish that social experiments fulfill rather than upset given conditions, that they emerge in a form that given conilitions recognize as good, and that they comply to a hegemony of love rather than truly challenge its hold over social life. It is to wish for a redemptive narrative authored by those who suffer most viciously from the hegemony of this form of intimacy. Instead

as a set of interpenetrating discourses about the geographi

cal origins and destinations of individual freedom and social

bondage and of these discourses as a vital aspect of liberal legitimacy and power. I suggest how this approach to reading the emergence of the intimate event in Empire would allow
us to rethink a set of philosophical and historical questions

that have been central to the story of liberalism's exceptionalism. To do so I animate these theoretical and historical discussions by placing them

in dialectic tension with contemas

porary problems and tactics of building intimacy outside the

of redemption's break from social life, I track the immanent

dependencies that emerge in actual life.

North/West. I draw on the previous chapters

well as other

postcolonial and settler colonial criticism to suggest the ways

in which these figurations of the self and other have been

Spiritual Freedoq, Cultural Copyright

One

pair of conch shells sits on my desk. Beside them sits a carved and decorated gourd. The shells are painted in the vibrant dot style most people associate with the Aboriginal aesthetic of the Central Desert and with Aboriginal art more generally. The carved gourd is decorated with costume jewelry a rodent head, a golden frgure affixed to

red seed, and a cheap plastic tiara clasped around the base. It is a piece that few people know how to classify when they rt.

see

bought the conch shells from a small shop just outside Darwin. According to my indigenous friends who live
nearby, the shells are "nothing." They are "ordinary" things,

meaning that neither the designs on the shells nor the shells
themselves manifest ol represent any existential

link to a ritual, ceremonial, or geontological event. Nothing about these shells joins the membranes of the given human world and
the always-present ancestral world. They are simply pretty or

beautiful or kitsch, depending on your particular aesthetic

point of view. I do, however, have a relation of kinship to the

artist who painted the shell. He is a son of an uncle of mine; both men usually live at Wadeye,
a

decorative object, more than the subject of commercial exchange, was how

large Aboriginal commu-

it materially articulated various persona!

nity in the Northern Territory on the western coast near the Western Australian border. I only know this kinship connection because, while looking at the shells, one of my indigenous mothers, Nuki, told me so.

transformative events of his life. The day I bought the gourd, Jai was traveling from an artist commune in Vermont to a radical faerie sanctuary in central Tennessee, where he lived and about which I will say more later. The gourd was composed of symbolic and material elements of these other social worlds-the lotus design refers to
a

I do not know exactly which

was the

"son," of all the possible sons of my uncle,

painter (the

number of candidates is large, given the system of kinship in

the region). Neither did my mother. The lack of an authorial specificity, beyond his general kinship relationship to me, was not the result of the famous co-production and co-ownership

pond in the Vermont

commune, the bead comes from an ayahuasca ceremony in

the Amazon, the rodent head and gourd are from the Radical

Faerie Short Mountain Sanctuary.

added the plastic tiara,

97

of Aboriginal designs and objects.l

It

esulted more simply

case,

taken from my girlfriend's fortieth birthday party.

from my mother's and my satisfaction that, in this

know-

ing the general kinship category of"husband" that connected

What makes the gourd spiritual for Jai - something rather than nothing-is not what it represents. The gourd is just
one of many artifacts of his "journey." Among radical faeries

me to the object was enough information for this particular

kind of social exchange. Because the shells were "nothing" it was enough that I liked them. It was also nice that they
were connected to me by kinship. But these kinds of connec-

know, as among members of many other self-expressive

counter-cultural movements in the United States and Western Euiope, the term "journey" glosses self-reflexive autobiography as spiritual exercise.2 lts sense and meaning refer

tions did not make the shells and their designs a membrane
between human ontologies and geontologies.

I bought the gourd from

white American friend, Jai, out

to a loose set of normative propositions about what constitutes a good life and what motivates human action-in this
case,
a

ofthe back ofhis car as he was traveling through upstate New

constant self-elaboration through shared experiences

as

York.
a

would call Jai my friend. We are not close, but nor are we simply acquaintances. According to Jai, the gourd is

mode of spiritual exercise. What makes the gourd spiritual

is its status as an actual material manifestation of Jai's com-

spiritual object. This may seem odd given that, at the tim
a

little market stall, rather than a sacred site; and we seemed to be engaged in a market exchange-cash for art-rather than in a ritual event. For Jai,
however, what made the gourd something more than a mere

I purchased it, his car constituted

mitment to a practice of continual self-elaboration oriented to building an alternative, progressive way ofliving and ofthe movement of people across various kinds of places and relationships A journey is intentional in this sense: it is a self-conscious

-acquaintance,

lover, friend.

commitment to self-elaboration. But a journey is not intentional in another sense; the agent is not the monological author ofhis life. The gourd reflects the conjunctural aspects of Jai's life, what has happened to him and how these accidental happenings affected the course of his life, as much as it represents what he himself caused to happen. Though in a world

them up. The borders, qualities, and social effects ofeach of

these seemingly free-standing objects are deeply entangled

of stranger socialit Jai is as dependent on others for a social

context as my friends in Australia. Thus, as well as being a durable sign of his life, the gourd acts as. a kind of ontological
bracket,
a drawing together ofexisting but unconnected backdropped practices and affectivities of social life through the

in one or the other, whether their authors intend them to be or not, whether I do or don't. Thus, rather than asserting that these objects and, more precisel the social worlds from which they emerge, have no relation to each other, or have their relationship merely through me, or are utterly different or are ultimately the same thing, this essay examines the kinds of.entanglements in which these social worlds find themselves, place themselves, and are placed by others. Of
particular importance to these entanglements are discourses
about the absolute difference between the descending object
99

will compose it. In this sense, autobiography is in its very nature spiritual, even as the writing of the self becomes a material practice that leaves behind material, if at times ephemeral and transitory,
process of selecting the objects (elements) that

of proper culture and the immanent object of deliberative

freedom, of worlds of kin and worlds of strangers, of families of birth and families of choice.s Why does

it matter, and to

objects.

whom, that certain communities and their economic, ritual,

Two objects, worlds apart, would seem to have nothing more to do with each other than that they reflect my "jour-

and social practices be apprehended as "free" and others

as

"constrained"? What work does this dichotomy do in de-

ney" across two very different social worlds. But concluding

this would be wrong. Despite the fact that they sit on my shelf

fining the social and political exceptionality of liberal forms of

constitutional democracies? How does this dichotomy allow

democratic institutions to exercise disciplinary force
as

in my home, the proximity of the shells and the gourd is not simply the material outcome of my particular journey or my particular approach to ethnography. I certainly move back and forth between a longstanding relationship with people in
Australia and an incipient relationship with people living as or alongside radical faeries, but the road that connects these
two groups had been built before

if they

were advancing freedom and protecting the good? What soci-

alities and politics emerge in places addressed by the violence

of democratic exceptionalism? In the previous essay I weighted the discussion toward how,

through

politics of cultural recognition and sensitivity, dis-

set foot on it. The gourd

courses of genealogy make and unmake the voices and bodies

was carved out of the curved space of the shells, the shells

of my indigenous friends and family even though these discourses do not describe the contours of their actual social

inflected by the shadow of the gourd, Iong before

I picked

worlds and relaliorjs euen where these reltior can be described,

s relntions of kinship.

alogy is the covertly negative social condition through which

Neither genealogical nor autological,

positive state values are distributed to indigenous subjects in settler colonies-such that indigenous Australians must remove themselves from the destiny of a hyper-valued freedom

they are nevertheless called on by state law and administrative

bureaucracies and public reason to appear as now the one and now the other. In this essay the weight lies on the other side

in order to obtain state resources-freedom is the overtly

positive social condition through which negative state disci-

ofthe disciplines ofindividual freedom and social constrainr. I track the disciplinary effects of discourses of autology and
genealogy in the experimental social worlds of friends of mine

plines are exacted on people like Jai. They are continua! characterized as being unencumbered by real families or real traditions real dependencies. At times they appear as the nightmare version of the modern unattached self. The difor.

who identify as radical faeries and their allies. And free nor constrained, but something else.

I try to

show how intimacy is made there, an intimacy that is neither

ferent ways that these discourses face these groups present a

real challenge to a project ofthe sort I am proposing. On the
one hand, one must find and refuse the diffeences produced

Though by different ends, radical faeries and indigenous

Australians are caught in the grip of the same discursive vise. The disciplines offreedom and constraint present these people with shared problems: How do they constitute social relations that are neither autological nor genealogical? How do they build material and emotional interdependencies diagonally to the disciplinary norms of these discouses? How do they do so when state regulatory and administrative bureaucracies, jurisprudence, and quotidian life treat these dis-

by discourses ofpersonal freedom and social constraint. Are

radical faeries "firee"? Are their journeys of self-discovery and self-elaboration initialized by or oriented to the autological imaginary of democratic constitutionalism any more

than the kinship practices of indigenous people along the northwest coast of Australia are initialized by or oriented to
the genealogical imaginary of the multicultural state? On the

cursive options as either self-evident truths or life-enhancing

goods? How do they constitute a subjectivity and sociality

that

other'hand, one must resist the temptationto flatten out the social differences between these worlds. To say that there is
no difference between the social worlds of indigenous people and radical faeries is as misguided as to say that their forms

not only absorbs the poison ofa vicious pervasive racism and

monolithic money-oriented capitalism, and an otheworld-oriented, often apocalyptic, spiritualism, but also
homophobia,
a

of diference are educible to the dichotomy of autology and

genealogy.

produce from these repressive social fields a viable antidote to them? But though theyare in the same vise, radical faeries and indigenous Australians face its two very diferent ends.

With this difficult double writing in mind, three broad rhetorical movements define this essay. I first sketch some of the
practices and imaginaries that cluster around the identity and

If

gene-

aspirational horizon of radical faeries, which run the gamut from a more or less rigid adherence to doctrine to a mote or less celebratory refusal of all doctrines. ..Radical faeies,, are in this sense a social genre, a social identity coordinated to and made sensible by an entire field of possible social posi_
one and the same time, people claim and assert this identity to make sense of the self within a com_

cal faeries are doing and claiming. They are apprehensive in the double sense that they wish to impose an epistemologi_
a sense

cal discipline on the radical faeries and that they experience of imminent harm in the vicinity of their practices. It

tions and practices.

At

in'these critical and juridical domains that rhe absolute difference between the descending object of proper culture and
is

plexly unfolding social field, to assert or contest a position

vis--vis others, and to designate a point of departure for the elaboration of new forms of social being. But I do not treat the immanent practice of this social genre as merely discursive, if
by discursive we mean the play of signs outside their material

the immanent object of deliberative freedom, of worlds of

kin

and worlds of friends and strangers, of families of

birth and

families of choibe are deployed to discipline and steer social groups to their proper homes. Why?
The essay ends by trying to undestand how the disciplin_ ing of radical faeries through a discourse of freedom para_

inhabitations. My radical faerie friends and I are not merely creatively coordinating a regime of signs. We are finding our-

in such a way that as we move across social space the social space itself comes to be
haunted by these makings. As discourses become hardened

selves made by these social regimes

doxically reanimates the self-evident good of liberal demo_ cratic forms of freedom and how, in this context, a politics of
espionage emerges as the foil to the cunning of recognition.

into the subject it becomes something other than mere dis_ course, it becomes affect, stance, and morality_independent vectors within social life. Next, I examine how some people within the critical in_
digenous public and the jurisprudence of religious certifica_ tion and cultural copyright apprehend these practices. I will
suggest that these publics and jurisprudences often read ex_ periments in sociality such as the radical faeries as mere ideo_ logical cover for illicit sex acts, as mere appropriation of other

Two

The radical faerie movement emerged as a philosophy of life associated with Harry Hay. By philosophy of life, I am refer_ ring to the argument of the French historian of ancient phi_ losophy Pierre Hadot that the ancienr Greeks saw philosophy as a lived experience, a mode of being in the world, rather than

scrutiny of doctrines or an execise in hemeneutics.a Hay may never have read Hadot but his life can be read as dedi_
as a

people's culture, or as seriously intended but legally dubi ous modes of religiosity. Many practitioners of law as well as many indigenous critics are clearly unsettled by what radi_

cated to just this form

ofphilosoph

a claim that enters the

dense, multivocal, and highly contested mytho-poetics that

suround him.
The emotional nature and volume of these mytho-poetics

in the founding of the modern gay movement in the United States.s In the r95os,
are not surprising given Hay's role
along with Chuck Rowland, Bob HuIl, Dale Jennings, Konrad Stevens, and John Gruber, Hay founded the Mattachine So-

mobilized both strategies, advocating for the civil and human

rights of homosexuals and researching what he considered to be the homosexual traditions of Native Americans, then
called the institution of "berdache" and now better known as

ciety as a social vehicle for promoting gay-positive attitudes

and civil rights in the United States, drawing significant theo-

"two-spirit."8 Hay's relation to berdache

was not merely aca-

demic. He claimed that as a young man he had been given the

blessing of Wovoka, the Washoe founder of the Ghost Dance,

retical and organizational principles from leftist and Marxist politics in Los Angeles. The Mattachine Societ as David Churchill has shown, was itself part of a larger transnational homophilic movement. This transnational movement, fostered by the print media circulating across

to help native peoples. Hay resigned from the Mattachine Society in 1953, during
the McCarthy era, which placed heightened scrutiny not only on homosexuals but also on those who, like Hay, combined
a Marxist perspective on class

it, pursued

two

signifrcantly different strategies for state recognition-one

based on the human civil rights of all men and women and another based on an anthropological study ofhomosexual cul-

with a gay liberation politics.

For the next ten years he researched Native American "berdache" practices, seeking to understand them as a different
way of conceptualizing the history of homosexuality. He described his study as focused on the centrality ofthe institution
of berdache

tural relativity.6

In

some ways these tw strategies complemented each

other. The civil rights strategy argued that respectable homosexuals were no different than respectable heterosexuals, dis-

in the spiritual life of Native Americans and other

tribal people; its origin in the ancient Near East and Medi
terranean where

solute homosexuals no different than dissolute heterosexuals. The anthropological strategy argued that homosexuality was a ubiquitous feature of all known cultures, even

it

developed into a priesthood; its history

allowing the male takeover of matrifocal institutions; the dis-

if

the

tinction between "state" and "folk" berdache that resulted;

and the continuing manifestations of these patterns up to the
eve of the modern era

ways that so-called primitive societies expressed homosexu-

ality differed. The anthropological currents rippling through

these transnational discussions provided a rich archive for Hay and the radical faerie movement he would help found, and continue to provide fodder for a number of anthropolo-

in Europe.e From tgTo ro r.g79, Hay

lived in northern New Mexico, where he pursued his studies

of Native American two-spirit and developed a post-Hegelian

understanding of gay spirituality. According to

Ha "spiri-

gists making sense of the worlds of Native and gay Native

Americans, especially W'ill Roscoe and Walter L. WiIIiams.T As an editor and contributor to the Mattachine Review, Hay

tuality" would come to "represent the accumulation of all experiential consciousness from the division of the frrst cells in
the primeval slime, down through all biological-political so-

cial evolution" to the moment-to-moment development of gay consciousness.lo He publicly inaugurated the radical faeries

within the movement. For instance, Scott Treleaven has argued that "although the Faeries still don't subscribe to any
particular set ofdogmas or religious structures" and although they draw eclectically from a wide range of cultural forms,
'they are "nonetheless a distinct tradition."

in

t97g at the "spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries." "Offering invocations to the spirits, Hay called on the crowd to 'throw off the ugly green frog skin of hetero-imitation

to find the shining Faerie prince beneath.' The intense air of celebration in a natural setting precipitated all manner 'Wiccan-inspired rituals, of pagan practices, circle castings,
ecstatic dancing, communal feasting and Nature-based religious offerings."rr
106

It is generally accepted

as a

henotheistic system, mean-

ing that there is one specific force or deity from which all

others.precipitate; a God, usually associated with Cernunos, Pan or another horned, priapic male deity; and a Goddess, recognized as a Divine Mother, a gendervariant male, a warrior or a Kali-like destroyer' This seemingly hetero-binary pantheon is actually consid-

John Harry Bonck has argued that the radical faerie movement emerged from the thinking of several leaders in the gay consciousness movement in the r97os, among them the psy-

chologist Mitch V/alker and the philosopher Arthur Evans'l2 For many social historians and activists, however, Hay stands

out because of his'assertion that gay men had been cut off from their spiritual natures, and that this spirituality could still be glimpsed and reclaimed by re-enacting pre-Judaic,
pre-Christian forms of ritual practiceFor Hay and other ear! members of the movement, the spiritual practices they were elaborating were not merely something borrowed from other cultures. They were their heritage. Because the old ways of faerie transformation were 'the nightmarish centuries of Judeo-

ered to reflect both sides of every human's psyche, with gender and sexuality being fluidic. Appropriately, Faerie Gatherings often involve ritualistic dismantling of gender barriers, gender transformation and celebrations of both the hyper-masculine and hyperfeminine.la

The radical faeries are certainly not the only countercultural movement that has turned decisively away from normative Judeo-Christian theologies and embraced, as antidote, a pan-pagan/indigenous spirituality. Symbolic rebirth through one or another indigenous/paganf anrrlist spiritual body was a central feature of certain U.S.-based eco-cultural feminisms
case

obliterated during Christian oppression," radical faeries were "free to invent new ones."13 The anthropological arguments of the r95os,

of the r97os and rg8os, and that is still

the

r96os, and r97os were redeployed. Homosexuality was not merely culturally ubiquitous. Homosexual culture was this

for environmentally oriented self-expressive members of counter-cultures.rs For instance, the biocentric philosophy of Earth First! and other radical green groups, or green faeries,

ubiquity. This continues to be the position of some voices

of indigenous draws heavi! on a distillation greens' the as with many radical BronTaylor has argued that' ..blamed

eco-philosophy'

the Foreman, founder of Earth First!, Dave for environmen. . ' , and Christianity as well' of "gri"oltrlre then' "the early Earth First! tal decline'"16 Not surprisingly' about not acceptjournal included language in its masthead

advent

what radical faeries are queers. As a result, to understand frnd those who sat*" .horrld not define the term and then of need to understand the modes isfy its criteria. Instead, we and genre is dispersed, contested' Iife across which this social
made sensible.

Its pages expressed enthusiasm irrg ,r" authority of the state' religions, and sometimes the other'"r? ci"lL D"oi.m and Buddhism' on

in part on various faerie This social genre is elaborated in the United States' Canada' sanctuaries and communities

and paganism' indigenous for anarchism, on the one hand, espereligions originating in Asia'

and communities have Australia, and Eqrope'ls Sanctuaries

the state-some communrdifferent legal standings vis--vis organizations; some own it ties own their land as not-for-profit not-for-profit religious organizations; as federally recognized

Historianshavedebatedvariouspartsofthehistoryofthe leave Mattachine? How central radical faeries' Why did Hay Did Woation of the radical faeries?
s

somerent.Theyalsohavedifferentwaysofframingwhatkind for instance' they are-WoIf Creek in Oregon'

of communiry

Whatever the facts, the social of self-identifred raditemporary practices and imaginaries from inspirational horizon to emcal faeries runs the gamut when this history is barrassing hagiography' Understanding us into the array of social relevant and for whom plunges styles that cluster under projects, aspirations, anJ aesthetic Like all social identities around the sign "radical faerie'"
and

the blessing? Did Hay travel through meet there? a shaman? Whom did he life of this history in the con-

community" whose goal is presents itself as an "intentional places of spiritual and culto "create, preserve and manage and Faeries and their friends" tural sanctuary, for Radical for renewal' growth and "to gather in harmony with nature'
shared learning'"re

refer to is a point of What "intentional" and "spiritual" Hay's defrnitions' Indeed' the some contention, no matter

fosmany of these communities very residential principles of

"radical faerie" can be

a longstanding' deeplY presupposed'

and communities ter such contestation' So*" sanctuaries Permapermanent residents' some don't'
for

reflected back onto the self resource of the self, continu;[y or it can be a momentary by surrounding social institutions; with cast aside' or invaginated allegiance that is taken up' Radical faeries can be articulated other available social forms' and anti-imperialism to gender, politics, envrronmentalism'

have a core set of are welcomed to these sanctuanes nent residents and visitors

after pursuing host of reasons. Some people, event in their lives' are politics or being shaken by a dramatic meaningful way of living their looking for a deeper and more
a

mainstream

up in alternative communities Iives. Some people grew

radior urban squats-so the bow tribes, organic communes'

raln-

resultinginfemalefaeries,radicalelves'andpostcolonial

ruptule of their cal faeries are a continuation rather than a way of life. rituals open Many sanctuaries host annual gatherings and
some gatherto anyone who feels called to participate, though small ings are restricted to men' During these gatherings' of a dozen or so men and women

interdependenorientation to nature's spirituality, material Indigene' cies, and progressive politics of self-exploration' hippie: these stylpagan,'Wicca, clown' s/r*1, psychedelic' and

residential communities people flock to are dramatica! transformed as hundreds of

have them. Some of the people who come to these gatherings fuIlare years; for some it is their first time' Some

of gatherings izations and others stretch across the surface body' They may reand across any one person's individual deeper within the main on the surface, or they may be etched
social skinTake, for instance,
a

ritual I attended during

an annual

Bel-

come for

110

are not' time faeries; others are not' Some are men; some Whitman or Some are flxated on Harry Hay; some see W-alt to build. cockettes as more relevant to the world they wish the
presses or alternaSome visitors are founders of alternative just seeking a sPace tive housing movements, while some are Some for making sense of their alternative gender identity' return to homes come to have sex. Thgse visitors and tourists
a radical faerie and work rhythms that may or may not reflect most of the people with whom I have

sanctuary'2o The tane gathering at a Southern radical faerie of a mayritual center of the Beltane gathering is the raising this event, visitors perform a host of other pole. Surrounding

11',l

prepared rituals that they invent on the spot or have carefully land' These to perform on what they consider to be sacred faerie shrines' rituals occur within a landscape spotted with of lost lovers' biodegradable art installations, memory stones self-discovery' and a biochemical space of drug-enhanced player, Ied one afternoon, a white man, Antler, a didjeridoo men through a ritual one of his posse of much younger white was of ablazbranding. It was an amazrgevent-the brand young man's entire ing sun and the burnt area covered the

philosophy, although

a new intenspoken at these gatherings say their life is given

.ity

dimension by participating in them-the ordinari"nd a new quality of ness of their "outside lives" is invested with spirituality. richer The further we move inside these gatherings the their and styles becomes the mlange of self-presentational gatherings citational and corporeal anchors' During these

Somemenandwomenseektore-enchantsocialitybyfosinterest in tering forms of magical realism' Others have no a place for re-enchantment, but rather see these spaces as
through an changing their attitudes, desires, and aspirations

by the sounds midriff. The sheer physicality was intensified of Antler's group' the drone pipes played by other members by the sounds Wrapped in the arms of another' surrounded considered' in and swirling of bodies, the young man was journey' This alignment some deep sense, to be alone on his a dense collection of of radical individual experience within ways defines the witnessing intimates and strangers in many was going ritual activity of these gatherings' As the branding

of

and astrologion, various Wicca conjurings, Celtic chanting'

People trade informahippie gatherings, and urban squats' shamans tlon o. surf the Web about where knowledgeable and elseor peyote rituals' They travel there' lead ayahuasca

where, Iooking for something that

will expand their

episte-

112

and seriousing the ritual repeated, with equal parts irony t".., .p""ific, highly formalized aspect of discourse that can " although they thembe heard within these gatherings-that' "too far"' the young man selves thought such practices went journey should be respected' was on his own journey and this safely' or at least be provided the space to be conducted

will provide them with mological and moral horizon and that about self-expansion' All new languages and ways of thinking what everyone is doing ofthese diverse life experiences inflect words' the social variatogether at thse gatherings' In other merely or most substantion within this counter-public is not styles' It is the tial! found in the surface register of sartorial move and vary' very nature of this counter-publii to I cart all sorts I, too, am a part of this world' insofar as back and forth' bringof ideas, objects, and social relations gatherings and faerie ing indigenous perspectives to faerie accidento indigenous communities' sometimes
pe.-rspectives

113

and trajecwould, however, artifrcially constrain the sources a social movement tories of their cultural makings' This is the composition that is explicitly oriented to circulation' As the circusuggest' and even these few vignettes of Jai's gourd
plays an important Iation of people, knowledge, and practices

and rituals To intern radical faeries in their sanctuaries

I have to contribute' t"Uy, ,o*"times because this is what a radical faerie l,r.i.rg a particularly tedious moment during by which information is heart circle-the communal means
sharedandconflictsresolved_ayoungmangotholdofthe speak for a very long talking stick and was clearly going to member of the commudme. I turned to Hush, a permanent mechanisms of nit and quipped that all "true cultures" had
and tackled the speaker' discipline and closure' Hush ran out

movement' And role in the world-making practices of this They may also be objects like Jai's gourd do not just travel' culture of cirtransformed in order to travel in a different gourds and turned culation. Jai took images of some of his them into a tarot deck. In other words, self-elaboration across a wide range shared practice works in, through' and including of other intentional or accidental communities'
settlements' faerie sanctuaries, Peruvian villages' indigenous
as a

women durbranding scene to a group of older indigenous They listened with an ing a drive from Belyuen to Wadeye' banter that characint"n." focus in marked contrast with the women' rntrips' When I was done' one of the terizes these

ontheothersideoftheworld,onedaylrecountedthe

"Now you listen hard"' dicating her seriousness by saying'

urged me to find Antler and explain to him that branding

was for

Yarrowin, had lost fou of her children. Argry and grieving,

cattle-real indigenous rituals did not brand

people.

1',tA

But I did not know where Antler was at the time. Even if I had found him, he might not consider himself to be doing an Aboriginal ritual. And even if I did persuade him to stop, he and I are not the onl or even the most important, couple' in the global circulation of New Age, freak, and alternative cultures that move through places like Be!en and that refigure the commonsense view of what Aboriginal culture is.2r In 1989, on a beach road, Belyuen women and I met one such traveler. He was from Ti.rrin, Italy, and he was pushing a bi cycle, dressed in nothing but his underwear. He had come to learn the Aboriginal wa he said, and according to my companions, some of the young men from the area had taken him around the coast showing him Dreming sites in exchange for
cigarettes and beer.

that she was not going to wait the usual year for her daughter's hopug, a mortuary ceremony in which the personal possessions ofthe deceased are ritually burned. Instqad she asked he nggen, Alice Wainbirri, the sister of
she declared her late husband; a few other female age-mates; the mcnggen
closest to her daughter, Diane Bianamu; her youngest daugh-

ter; and I to take her daughter's clothes to a nearby coastal outstation and burn them immediately. Ruby's family had
lived at the outstation when her husband, Roy Yarrowin, was
alive. His nyuidj, spirit, still resides there, playing games with
115

his extended family whenever they visit. Two troop carriers went to the burning, loaded with extended family. During the

burning Ruby Yarrowin insisted that I help Diane burn the clothes. I hesitated, and the other older women lightly objected, but on Ruby's insistence point the clothes touched me.

went ahead. At a certain

I don't know where the man from Turin went after he left us, but I'm sure he took ihe encounter with us as a personal citational resource. Again-as I do. After all, I'm not merely spectator and translator between these communities. I'm called on to participate in ways that make my encounters as awkward as anyone else's. A,particular! painful example of this awkwardness occurred around the death of a younger indigenous sister of mine in zoo4. She was born and raised at Belyuen, but was Living in Darwin when she was hit by a car and left for dead. She spent few weeks in the intensive care ward in a coma at Darwin Royal Hospital, during which time her family was given false hope that she might recover. She did not. With her daughter's death, her mother, Ruby

After

we were done, some of the older women asked me to

take them home, and then others insisted that

we reached

drive them

back so they could fish for the resr of the day. Right when the beach, the gearbox ofmy troop carrier broke.
The short version of the story is that, until three in the morn-

ing,

pushed, tugged, and begged the truck, inch by sandy

inch, back to the main road with the help of people from Bel-

ren and two men from the truck rental agency. The next morning, earlier than I would have liked, I was awakened by
a

delegation of elder women. They wanted to make sure that

I knew that Roy Yarrowin had punished me for touching my

dead sister's clothes.

"That old lady know that. Bet you know

that the cousin Qnnnggen) that." Which was true - I do know burn the only person who can safely or aunt ofthe deceased is I ceremonies' I knew that' but personal items during these have no matter why she might couldn't refuse Ruby Yarrowin' asked me to violate this law' know other things' I do not Though I know this, I do not be' these mortuary rituals can know, for instance, how far these ways of mediating beor should be, extended' Shouid of stop for me when I drive out
tween the living and the dead

are imfact that material, subjective, and social conditions across always posed on and necessary for forms to circulate already informed social sPace' AusMen and women from the coastal region in northwest to move tralia face a similar sort of problem when they decide

of their away from the thick kinship-inflected communities or birth to places such as Darwin, Elcho Island' Katherine' away from the Broome. They may do so for jobs or to get the constant low-level infections rife on rural communities' Diane Biademand-sharing, or a fight' If I listen to my sister

116

Belyuen? They don't' How for this to be the I would have to be made out of concrete grieving the forms and modes of my case. And yet, although this grieving' Belyuen ways of are now deeply informed by forms any guidance on how these simple fact does not provide sense an altiforct of thern' make any

could

the after

so many years?

provide the namu, who has made such a choie, these cities excitement and relief of stranger sociality. Demand-sharing commuis not as all-consuming as it is in small indigenous better' and day-to-day health and health care is often nities, hour There are movie theaters and video stores, twenty-four and food and liquor markets, casinos, public transportation' positive benethe rich languages and styles of the region' The dwelling do not, however' evacuate a perfrts of suburban son's social history- How does one hold a kapug urban backyard surrounded by

117

anmodes, or how I, as

can make up "Belyuen'" How outside of the social frelds that modes and other ritually mediated these forms of mourning' worlds whose social presuppositions of life, move across social words' the form and mode signifrcant! different? In other
are

in a sub-

of mourning sensibly regiment' worlds in which they arise' the social characteristics of the the United States if everyone How can a kapug be held in Are families of choice there is related by stranger sociality? the n'Lenggenin such a family? good enough? Who would be

and are made sensible

all

friendl or not

so friendly'

irrd

that in this iack, stillmourning

and the social practices y"t, the lack of these social roles the fact that I am also' support them does not change
as

Momen

if they were there' This haunt-

primari!' a challenge of transing is not merely, or perhaps

return to their natal communities to hold such rituHow als. But this simply creates other kinds of problems' hinterland does someone living in Darwin or its suburban for the emotional and social connections necessary
maintain impossibility organizing a mourning ritual? Sometimes the

lation-not

mean_but about the about what these practic es

inforof grief or any of the other of constituting these rituals to local is exact! what binds people mal rituals of interaction from them is to move too far worlds. To move too far away been constituted by them' away from the self that has are hardly limited to indige' These embodied disturbances in some critical sense' human nous people. They constitute' Mountain SanctuWicker, who lives at the Short
existence.

radical faeries was litical conformity. The magic of the

answer.

one

these modes of somodes of connectivity: What differentiates indigenous people's? Where cial life, mine from faeries' from one mode of producing "someare the boundarios separating "nothing" ftom another mode? Who

forms and Two objects, three scenes' and multiplying

thing" and designating

into the radical faeries ary, describes his journey

as

initiated

i, ,nt. same kind of subjective

'118

haunting' Drafted into the Midwestern town' he reU.S. Army from a moderate-sized in Vietnam to frnd the town turned from his tour of duty and comfortable now too culin which he was once happy

tura!

No matter how traumatrc and socia! homogeneous' of lt sensitized him to other ways his stay in Southeast Ati"' at home' made him uncomfortable being, and this serisitivity unusual about Wicker's experiThere is nothing particular! college in the big city who leave a slee!y town for
ence. People

their is interested in producing these separations' ".rd destinations? Some peomeanings, dynamics, qualities' and care whether or not nonple might wonder why they should ofself-elaboration that irrdige.torrc people engage in practices symbols and sometimes sometimes use indigenous and pagan constrain' or control the play do not. How does caring capture'

*h"t

119

of social life? of New Age spirituNot all indigenous people are critical radical faeries' The men alities such as those practiced by the

way. are often affected in the same .Wicker to leave his caused what Moreover' go home again'" than his retrospecio-"to*r, i,, no doubt' more complicated condense' reorder' and

It

is a clich: "you can't

the coast' showing him who took the man from Turin around him public stories about camping and sacred sites and telling whether he wore a feather' played

tive

suggests

.*""p Ji",t
encounter

parts of a life that fall outside 'W'icker's experience was his plotment. What particularized including the with a set of homophobic institutions

'

Bild'ungsroms often

these sites, didn't mind stories he had collected the didjeridoo, or shared with them communities' But others are both-

the narratrve em-

from other indigenous ered.Theirreactionsrangefromabare!disguisedhomoterms of cultural propety phobia to a sustained critique in Affair of Genocide"' ,igfrr.. In his blog essay, "An Innovative
and activist Reverend the Indigenist commentator' educator'

establishment around ntv/etus' Army and the ear! medical and self-realization sesA variety of consciousness-raising one to ask what was possible once sions in the r97os led him and poeffects of commercial' social' saw the self-deforming

of the defrning legends of Sequoyah Ade reflects on some their political impact on his the radical faerie movement and political ideology!'22 own struggle to articulate an "indigenist

While supporting the emancipation claims of gays and lesbians, Ade considers the symbolic appropriations of indigenous

bewildering rituals comprised of two parts of what they think is Sioux religion, Celtic sun worship, a dash of
the l-Ching and three-eighths of revisionist sex-positive

traditions by radical faeries to be at best insensitive and at worst a fom of cultural genocide.
According to legend, inrgTo, Hay (who also claimed to
have had an Apostolic encounter with spiritual leader

Christianity curiously appears to arrive at a sort of Gay version of the neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator.B

It is important to note that Ade

does not dismiss the struc-

Wovoka, the prophet of the Ghost Dance in his youth

tures of power and discrimination that gays and lesbians face.

in Nevada) journeyed to New Mexico in an attempt to make this connection by frnding a real living Berdache, since "real" Indians are primarily seen as phantasms of the American past. While I could not frnd any evidence of Hay actually locating his Berdache among the

He seems to believe, more or less, that if gay people would lrctremain gay that would be o.r. What he criticizes is what
he considers to be the helter-skelter appropriative religiosity

of the radical faeries. What initially seems harmless, even fun, when gay men are just being gay men, becomes fascist
and genocidal for Ade when rhey express this gayness through

first official gathering called the "spiritual Conference ofRadical Faeries" took place in Arizona headed by Hay, John Burnside' Don Kilhefner, Mitch \falker and openly gay writer Will Roscoe. More
Pueblos,
:.gTg the

in

ritual appropriation.
Why this emphasis on ritual invention and on gay sexuality? Why do the appropriation of indigenous identity and the invention of religious rituals become the key tropes through which the eclectic worlds of this and other counter-cultural
movements are artifactualized and critically apprehended?

than zoo men took part in the meeting conducting what

they felt to be "authentic" Native American spiritual rituals sprinkled with various bits and pieces from other
European traditions, mostly Pagan. Euroamerican Gay
males stood about in the desert dressed for the occasion.

Scottish kilts combined with fringed buckskin boots and Southeast Asian body markings of warrior clans
past were displayed alongside others dancing to Indian

Three

Ade's emphasis on the appropriation of indigenous identity and the invention of ritual is due, at least in part, to claims by
Hay and his hagiographers that his encounter with W'ovoka,

hand drums buck naked with feathers tied to their "Indian" braids and other appendages. Initially this hodgepodge of confused Wasi'chu pseudo-religious theology
seems harmless and fun for those involved' Practicing

the founder of the Ghost Dance, constituted an indigenous authorization of the movement. This emphasis is also due, in part, to the centrality of ritual in defining cultural difference

in a post-anthroplogical imaginary and the-absolute difference this imaginary draws between cosmological meanings
and sexual practices.

nomic realm and ordinary time and space? How does it signal its singular ability to reanimate and manage this multi
worldliness?

Ritual is arguably the heart of culture and cosmology in the classical anthropological imaginary as well as in mass media accouns of cultural difference. If you want to understand a culture, study its rituals. And anthropologists did, tracking, mapping, comparing, and theorizing ritual differ-

So, how do faerie rituals sit within this anthropologi cal imaginary of culture? The symbolic center of a Beltane
gathering, held annually on May Day at a faerie sanctuary in the rural South, is the ritual raising of a maypole. The commune of about twenty people swells to several hundred visitors who camp throughout sanctuary grounds. The flrst thing

of view, ritual is where culture symbolically expresses itself most densely,

ences throughout empire. From this point most unconsciousl most self-referentially and with breath-

taking virtuosity, even as "culture,"

as a

shared normative ori-

to note about this ritual, as with many faerie rituals, is the enormous innovation around the key symbolic events-what kind of dress people wear, the choreography of the maypole
dance, and the shape of the maypole-and the sub-rituals that precede and follow the pole-raising ceremony. This said, a basic diagram of the ritual can easily be discerned. In the weeks leading up to the event, elder members of the commune choose, cut, and prepare the maypole, which is usually about twenty feet, and prepare the hole on the central knoll

123

entation, is re-constituted. Ritual reanimates and re-presents social normativity through the refracted mirror of another

ontic realm-another more powerful world enters this world by means of ritual-and ritual manages this entry in such a
way that the given world is reproduced rather than shattered.

In other words, many anthropologists

as the

have viewed

ritual

primary means by which a culture's clock is continu-

ally reset, remaking the present in the affective, symbolic, and

practical form ofthe past.2a In this literature, the real point of ritual-its telos-is the generation and reconstitution of community by stimulating desires and feelings toward components ofthe moral and social orders through concentrated
references to symbolic phenomena and processes.2s The task

into which it is inserted. After breakfast, participants are encouraged to go to their tents and prepare their bodies for the ritual. In the late morning, community elders call the
group to the knoll and assemble them into alargeheart circle

of cultural theory has been to answer how ritual achieves this multi-worldliness and how in achieving it social norms are iterated. How does ritual signal the presence of another world? How does it signal the break between this new onto-

in which everyone present holds hands. Then, members and friends ofthe sanctuary are called on to open the ritual with their own, often quickly inspired, sub-rituals, such as lamentations to Earth, water, and flre. The maypole is raised. A
dance around
a day

it commences, its end marking the end of the

formal phase of the ritual. Participants are then released into

of general and multiple activities-dancing, sex, drum-

ming, food preparation, sun-bathing, tarot reading, sweats, and massage. It is during these post-ritual meanderings that
the ritual is ratifred, and where a general consensus emerges that the ritual did, or did not, effectively reanimate an ontic

ticity ofthe ritual nature ofthe event because they are already discursively linked to drug-inflected ritual techniques of indigenous Southwestern U.S. and Amazonian groups' The way I have just described the raising of the maypole

realm always already within the quotidian world' Although it's left to members to decide how to prepare

would fit neatly within most anthropological views of ritual'

The ritual draws on and creates

their bodies for the event, bodily preparation and discourses

about bodi! preparation are elaborate and intense' They include the construction of a wide range of costumes from the sideshow "carny" to witch and warlock motifs, and the consumption of drugs. Usually, a consensus emerges over the
course ofthe week, guided by those responsible for the ritual, about which kind of drugs would best enhance the activities'

rigid separation between the supra-ordinary and the ordinary world, its typical rhythms, values, and styles of the self. Careful thought goes into the construction of this biospace, drawing a far-flung network of human and material resources into its central axis' much in
a

the way that indigenous women and men I know ecruit their neighbors into rituals in order to expand, consolidate, or initiate claims to places, people, and things. Poetically reflexive, fractually recursive practices consolidate the internal coherence of particular ritual as well as linking it to the larger arc

125

Individuals are free to do other drugs, or no drugs at all' But the ritual is conceptualized in part through the way that ordinary space-time can be bent on the basis of well-known and well-practiced understandings of the typical psychological states of a man or a woman on ecstasy, rso, psychedelic mushrooms, Ketamine, cnn, and other homebrews' The experience of space and time is not bent mere! by drugs but also by the

ofthe gathering. Throughout the week, for instance, visitors are encouraged to participate in small heart circles, which
are consensually organized spaces for the expression of feelings about the gathering, how it has or has not changed them, and thoughts about how it could be better organized' These

opening and closing of ritual events, the kind of music played, natural or artificial lighting, the color and shape of costumes'

forma! construed infomal

spaces cultivate and direct feel-

All these elements are coordinated to intensify the biospacetime. Nevertheless, the ingestion of drugs and the constitution of biospace is not merely functional- Many faeries have participated in indigenous organized rituals that utilize the
hallucinatory powers of ayahuasca, psychedelic mushrooms, and peyote to conjoin the ordinary and geontological worlds' Drugs act as medium, index, and certification of the authen-

ings, providing them with a shape, procedure, and language' These small heart circles provide the affectively and semiotically reflexive ground from which the large heart circle moving around the maypole at the main event draws its semiotic
energy.

Other radical faerie rituals might stretch the classic anthropological imaginary and public patience about the legiti macy of the claim that faerie rituals are rituals in any serious

sense. For instance, a dance party

might lie at the far end of

pear to break sharply the token/type relations that preceded the

the kind of event that qualifies as a ritual for many anthropolo-

part

no matter how they socialized. Men who liked men

gists, as well as for many ordinary people. And yet some local commune members described
a

sexualized with men though they socialized

in erotic

ways

dance party, held during one

Beltane week, as a ritual. The party was held in the sanctuary temple, a three-story wooden building with a central
open atrium, a second-story balcony, and several bedrooms on the third floor. A group of New Yorkers who had come to

with women and transgendered persons. The same can be said about the women and transgendered persons at lhe party. But for many of these same people the ideal of "openness," an orientation to new affective, sexual, and carnal opportunities and the way that this orientation placed typical life under suspi-

the mountain for the gathering hosted the party. They took
126,

responsibility for the community dinner before the event, designing it around the theme of an exclusive New York restau-

cion, mattered corporea! The very fact of this normative shift changed the materiality of normative sexuality no matter
who had sex with whom.

rant. A number of men and

acted as status police, allow-

ing some people to enter the exclusive section of the dinner, turning back others. When the Statue of Liberty showed up

However, the value of the party hardly escaped the play of contestation. The shape, scope, and outcome of a range of chemical enhancements and public sex acts were debated

drunk, homeless, and lacking an invitation, he was beaten and thrown out. The dinner thematic of rigid social status was then contrasted to the dance aesthetic of radical social blurring. A consensus emerged that what made the party great was this blurring of social identities, its attempt to push beyond
the notion of social heterogeneit not merely by promoting a density of the "kinds of people" participating (men, women,
and transgenders; straight, gay/lesbian, and bisexual; locals,

the next day, especially as they concerned practices of safe

sex. People argued about: whether the sanctuary should take

to sex and drugs; whether people should disclose their HIv status; what kinds of
a harm reduction or abstinence approach
sex

should take place on sanctuary land; how and which drugs

and chemicals should be used; if there should be a consensus

about these things or if it was the point of radical faerie sociality and spirituality that each person was on his or her own

journey of exploration. But then again, was the use of the ambiguous notion of "journey" just a way people avoided their ethical responsibilities in an epidemic?26

out-of-towners, and residents) but also interrogating the desirability of "kinds of people" on which liberal heterogeneity

depends-the rigidly preserved Bantustans of identity poli tics. After the event, people noted that at certain points they did not know who was a token of which type of person. De facto, partyers tended to sexualize in a way that did not ap-

These questions certainly suggested why many participants thought this was a 1reat, or not so gteal, party,bulit hardly tells us why it was considered by some to have been
a

rittnl.Theanswer has several parts. In some sense' the ritual

nature of the party was the result of nothing more than an supassertion that the party was a ritual' This assertion was ported by the narrative coordination of the place and time of the party to the context of the May Day gathering and

own addled minds ence between real magical events and their sexual and chemiand that such naivet was what led to unsafe

the possical practices. Others responded with humor' But inbility that magic couldhappen, not whether it did in this
these stance, is one of the deep presuppositions animating men' ritual events, and what makes them, for some of these

the coincidence of a lunar eclipse the night of the party' In the other words, the illocutionary force of the assertion that party was a ritual drew its baptismal energy from its performative association with these other events' These externa! oriented narrative coordinations were anchored to other interna! co-referential practices-for instance, the opening and closing of the party, which marked it off from the ordi
nary ebb and flow of the gathering' All of these semiotic anchors were carefully coordinated to the anticipated biophysi

not merely a circuit PartY.

popular Demonstrating that these practices meet certain evaluaquell and anthropological criteria of ritual would not just a bunch as those by Ade, that these are rea!
tions, such groups' of white guys, with smatterings from other social what is making up spirituality as they go along, mystifying would be satreally just a drug-addled sex party' To think Ade and isfred with this analysis is to miss the broader historical critique social conditions out of which his specific indigenous To underof the intersection of ritual and sexuality emerges' to shift need we these historical and social contexts
129

of cal reactions that participants would have to certain forms

music, lighting, rhphms, and chemicals' Finally, as with the pole-raising, the party was retroactively ratifred as a ritualit had some people claimed this status for the party because produced spiritual effects. Throughout the following da dissaw cussions centered on a dragon that some people said they

stand

flying across the fuIl moon, in the post-eclipse s!, and on a

after certain vibration that the temple seemed to give offlong the party had ended. Ofcourse, all these assertions and interpretations existed amid competing points of view' Some questioned whether the temple was actually vibrating, countering that these vibrations were the result of the sound system or

and from an abstract analysis ofthe formal properties ofritual historical from a focus on gay sexuality and spirituality to the in the making of uses of indigenous spirituality and sexuality

anthropological discourses concerning ritual sex' outChristopher Herbert has detailed some of the broad how' during lines of this history. He has, for instance, shown "a broad the late eighteenth and ear! nineteenth centuries'
society is reversal of assumptions [occurs] in which 'savage' desire transformed from a void of institutional control where is rampant to a spectacle of controls exerted systemically

the'"racked" perceptual systems of post-partyers' Some quesa tioned the status ofthe dragon; clear! it could have been good cloud. They offered these alternative possibilities with a
dose of scorn, saying that other people

the emerupon the smallest details of daily I$e'u2'Indeed'

pivoted on ethnogence of anthropology as a modern science

didn't know the differ-

pornographic portraits of saturnalian rituals of savages giving way to ethnographic analyses of the cosmological meanings

tit

makes a certain sense. Ade is struggling to pull a way

of colonial ritual. Where sex was thought to or did exist in ritual form, anthropologists argued that its primary purpose
was to express, represent, and transact a symbolic

of being out of the grip of the Western opposition between sexuality and spirituality. As some radical faeries attempt to

build

order-a

cosmology. Professional anthropology increasingly insisted, contra old.er ethnopornographers - sexologists such as HaveIock Ellis and novelists and amateur ethnographers such as

form of religiosity out of a mode of indigenous sexualit indigenous people like {.de are struggling to separate an actual indigenous history from the cultural imaginary of settler history. He is criticizing radical faeries for parroting
a

Richard Burton-that the secret of ritual carnality was not human sexuality but human culture, the rule of law animating the social order. W'hat were initially perceived as indexes of the primitive corporeality of savage life - passions unregulated by any real cultural logic-came to be understood as profoundly cosmological system that integrated social realms. Professional anthropolothe material manifestations of
a

rather than critically deconstructing this history- The gourd housing itself like a hermit crab within the shells frnds itself in a property struggle or, perhaps, in a propriety struggle about
the proper elements that must be in place for a ritual to be
a

131

true ritual, for a spirituality to be a true spiritualit culture a true culture, because aII of these truths are the condition of recognition of indigenous people within the framework of
state cultural difference. The conditions of recognition for

gists argued that to apprehend this law lurking beyond the flesh of ritual, one needed to look past, not more closely into, the actual corporeality ofritual. This transfrguration of carnal
acts

radical faeries aren't the same. The separation of ritual acts and sex acts is one of the
foundations for establishing the difference between gourd and shells. But it is not the only separation. The charge that radical faeries are having sex seems less charged at times than the claim that they are making up their culture. Creativity is

into symbolic acts provided the discursive grounds for

domesticating the difference between the sacred and profane, religious and secular, private and public' For instance, the
coastal and inland region from which the two shells sitting on

my desk were collected was the scene of exactly these kinds of scientific disciplines. And lest anyone forget, the print media in the far north ofAustralia periodically circulated the "true" and "scandalous" history of ritual sexuality.2s

often cast as the Achilles heel of the New Age. On its Web site, one gallery of Aboriginal art proclaimed: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal

Art

derives its

In the shadow of this histor Ade's insistence on the separation between ritual acts and sex acts, between homosexuality as a sexual identity and indigeneity as a cultural iden-

worldwide acclaim from the very roots of Australian Aboriginal Culture and Tradition. It is not NEw-it is not
ORCHESTRATEO-it iS NOt DEVISED-it iS NOt DESIGNED

-it

is not and never can be a Nnw AGE "cRE'arED"

...

WONDER.

No whiteman could ever be so clever

as

to propagate'

negotiate, advertise and launch such an undertakingIndigenous no other people-other than our Australian

The shells could have been something, could have been tethered to an authentic spiritual tradition, because something
sits behind the shells

people-could be capable of such a feat' Of course, it is relevant! new in the history of colAbIectable art-of course Aboriginal Painters and original Communities are employing curators to exhibit their art-but DEVISED and uew AGE are not relevant
adjectives.

culture that has "animated whole societies over some considerable stretch of time."3o Not so with the gourd. No matter

as Charles

Taylor once put it,

human

it may replicate an indig-enous artifact (note, not a claim that Jai makes for it), no authentic long-standing culture is seen to subtend it on which a politics of recognition
how exactly
can or should be

built. Because the gourd

is created freely, as,

The best team of writers in the Walt Disney Enter'132

prise could never, never, create the stories' characters' the charm, situations, mystique and authenticity of
past and works which our Indigenous people have in the still are, offering to the world' It is inherent in our Aboriginal peoples' culture to

supposedl are the radical faeries themselves, no presumption of cultural value need be extended to them' Certainly,
Hay may have considered the radical faeries to be a part of a Iong cultural tradition viciously destroyed and now freely reinvented. And given the weight that the law of cultural recog-

nition places on the genealogical conditions oftolerance and

worth, it is not surprising that Hay and others would seek a genealogical solution. But for many outside this movement,
the feries remain at most a "partial cultural milieu within a society" and, given their blurring of sex and religion, no more than a phase of "decadence."3 The bald claim of the Web site quoted above may be true enough in many instances. The problem, however, is not that members of various New Age movements, such as the radi cal faeries, aren't all that creative, although, to be sure, par-

their Mother observe, to endure, to live in harmony with land, to use the gifts she offers, to shae them amongst
the

famil to guard the land on which they depend' to

oftheir elders and the stories oftheir

to them' to abide by the beliefs and tradition passed on

obey the wisdom

Dreaming-all this is what we are privileged to perceive in Contemporary Aboriginal Painting and Artefacts'2e
past Custom and creativit inheritance and innovation' shop in Ausand future orientations: the shells I bought at a the autralia might be nothing. But fo people like Ade and its thors of this W'eb page on Aboriginal art, the shell derives from the status as nothing from a source that is very different as something' source from which the gourd derives its status

ticular people may infact be more or less creative, more or

less

predictable, in how they sample and assemble diverse ele-

ments of social life, elements scavenged from junk heaps, garbage cans, and thrift stores as well as from other people's tra-

ditions. The problem is the discursive emphasis that radical

faeries place on inilividual

creativit that in expressed'

id'eol-

debated. For instance, Jai may invest spiritual value in the gourd because of how it draws together and manifests an im-

ogylhe orientation is toward sampling, selecting, and assembling one's own life as a self-expressive artifact in a context in which true indigenous culture is characterized, in the ideology of law and society, as iterative, as disciplined by the descending object.

portant set of events in his life. And he may attribute my attraction to and selection
vestment. But

ofit

as evidence

ofthis spiritual in-

can decide that the gourd contains no such

as

If

the radical faeries have a "culture," then

spiritual qualities without breaking any of the discursive protocols of the onto-theological discourse of autobiography

its discursive grounding seems to rest frrmly on the backbone

of the paruenr-discourses and practices that measure the worth of a life, and a societ relative to its capacity to constitute and vest sovereignty in the individual-even if thi is not strictly true.

spiritual exercise. My journey may well be that I am not in touch with the energy of the gourd or, more interestingl that in my presence the gourd does not have this energy-that
with me, it is nothing. These exercises of doctinal discourse,

This is what I mean when I say that there is a certain truth to Ade's claim. If members of the radical faeries are not "making up" their culture, they are certainly oriented to explicit contestation about what lies within the borders of the radical faerie movement and what lies outside themwhat is and is not "something." We can simply listen to the

iron

and self/

other-deprecation are mobilized not merely for the sake of

identity formation but also for the sake of the economic health ofself-identified faeries and the self-identifred faerie sanctuaries that dot North America, Australia, and .W'estern

Europe.

Living for the most part in national and international grey

economies, committed radical faeries (for whatever duration)

multivocality and multifirnctionality of the term "journey" to see this. As well as referring to a certain onto-theology of self-reflexive autobiograph the term "journey" provides
a discursive pivot around which a person can elaborate his
own

often support themselves through a mixture of welfare, occasional work, small organic food markets, and small "suitcase"

markets such as the one that Jai and

I constituted out ofthe

identit

allegiances, and self-reflexive capacities against

back of his ca.32 Faerie sanctuaries, for the most part non-

and across the full spectrum of permanent, part-lime, and occasionally identified radical faeries who constitute this par-

profit land trusts, must generate income for taxes, building expansion, travel, and food. Gatherings-communal events
drawing into these communes members of the counter-public
and othe interested or allied

ticular counter-public. Relying on cascading orders of inference, the term "journey" can be used seriousl and ironi-

groups-on the land or benefits

call

as

onto-theological insight, doctrine, and self-delusion,

held offthe land provide one means by which cash is generated. Particular styles of identity-as.difference emerge in part

in such a way that the location ofthe center, edge, and heart
of "the radical faeries" is continually disturbed, divided, and

from this economic need to draw people's resources and iden-

tifrcations to one place and away from other possible places.

Just as one person may quash another person's assertion that a magical event has happened, or that some object is in fact

(She really understands. She learned it from that old lady).

In

other words, seeing fo oneself under the tutelage of knowledgeable elders is the firmest ground on which an assertion

generating spiritual energy. so members of one cornmunity

may charge another with becoming too

of truth about something can be made. Second to this mode of knowledge acquisition and truth assertion is the personal experience of the !ower of a geontological event during ordinary everyday interactions, as in "I never believed proper!

commercial-tourist-

oriented-and with having lost sight of the spiritual orientation of the movement. Visitors to gatherings sometimes voice
criticisms of what are perceived as non-progressive aspects
of gatherings. Permanent members of sanctuaries sometimes address, sometimes dismiss these criticisms, helping to gen136

but I been look myself today."

These evidential grounds do not hold for all indigenous

Australians, whose social experience and life-courses vary

erate the divergent personal and community styles that are then drawn into debates about what makes a radical faerie a

widel and certainly do not hold across the global terrain of indigenous worlds. Disinherited by the forces of settler
colonialism from anything that could be regarded as a presettlement song, language, object, or land, many urban indigenous people individually select and sample from a va-

"true" radical faerie-that is, the qualities that hinge token

to type, and constitute type as such. But how different is this kind and level of contestation from
what we see in the ordinary lives of my friends along the northwest coast? What is and is not "something," for instance, in the sense that Nuki and I were using this term to refer to

riety of public sources to constitute their own personalized,

often marketable, version of indigenous symbolic life.e In
these spaces, the differences between indigenous and nonindigenous can begin to blur. Take, for instance, the reaction
of a young white man at a faerie gathering to the spotting of a

the shells, can be a matter of serious dispute in indigenous

worlds, animating heated debates not only about the status of
a thing (song, picture, object) but also about what should be the evidential grounds for assessing competing claims about

red-tailed hawk circling the communal kitchen. He pointed

to the bird, telling a couple of us sitting nearby that it was his

the status of a thing. Among indigenous people I know, special emphasis is placed on the personal experience of the

spirit totem. I asked him how he had acquired this particular bird as his totem. He replied that he had just always felt
a

power of a geontological site or thing as this experience is mediated by the opinion of knowledgeable elders.33 The importance of this mode of knowledge acquisition in authorizing truth claims is signaled by such common statements as, "That one sebi proper! im been there got that wulgamen"

strong personal attachment to the red-tailed hawk. He then

described an encounter with another hawk that frgured this

personal attachment as ultimately authored by the bird itself.

He said that he was standing in an abandoned field when

red-tailed hawk swooped down and caught a snake. Instead

of flying offwith it, the hawk just stood there eating it. Soon
a

not share common activities or beliefs, flt the legal definition of a local descent group:

crow came by and the hawk leapt into the air with the snake

in its talons, passing with outstretched wings just inches from

his body. This young white man's story was not so different in its surface elements from those I have heard from indigenous men and women in and around Darwin. These stories

His Honour: It's a bit of a nebulous concept, isn't it? I

mean if you take.the members of the Melbourne Cricket

Club, ofwhich there are tens ofthousand", I certainl

being one, don't know all ofthe others. I know how to ascertain who all ofthe others are in the sense that I know

of an individual's spiritual encounter with a specific animal species sutures together, if awkwardl the skin of these men
and women as each absorbs and refigures the mytho-poetics of indigeneity available to them.
134

that somewhere there's a register on which the names

all appear. Are we a group or are we a category or how
do you describe

However, even where urban indigenous people lack text

us?

13s

artifacts that signal the presence of the descending

ob-

ject, they can evoke the presence of the genealogical society through the notion of race. Since the r98os, urban indigenous groups have marked their distinct social standing in the heteroglossic settler nations through their racial heritage as

His Honour: There's some-you have to have, you would sa some kind of cohesive element before you
become a group?

Dr. Rose: Some kind of shared project together, perhaps. Some kind of mutual understanding of why you belong together.

figured by a human descent group. A sociocentric genealogi-

cal chart can be used to designate memberhip in a social group even in the absence of any shared knowledge, symbolic
substance, or social practice. The political effectiveness ofthis

His Honour: That's not really what I'm putting [sic].

If you

go back to the Melbourne Cricket Club, you say

strategy depends on the compelling nature of a distinction between aggregated individuals of choice and the mass subject

that for some purpose, at least, the Melbourne Cricket Club would constitute a group and that, notwithstanding that we're not watching sport together at the same time, only some of us are from time to time, but we are all descended from people, are we a descent group? Dr. Rose: No. His Honour: No. And why not, because there has to be
some, presumably, some relevant connection between the ancestors and the cohesive factor?

of genealogical determintion.
ferences between kinds of

It was just these questions-

what makes a group a "group" and what constitutes the dif-

groups-that fascinated, fastened, and gripped the attention of lawyers and anthropologists in an exchange during a land claim as they tried to articulate
why a large, thousand-plus, urban-oriented Aboriginal claim-

ant group, many ofwhom did not know each other and did

Dr. Rose: Well, no, becausetheMelbourne Cricket Club is not constituted on a principle of descent. You become
a

indigenous; i.e., just as with the radical faeries, the category

emerges retroactivel an artifact ofthese social struggles over genre.

membe-well I don'tknow, butyou wouldknowhow

you become a member.

His Honour: The criteria for joining is not descent's ln this exchange, indigenous groups' as opposed to cricketers and, for that matter, radical faeries, are not families of choice any more than they are cultures of invention, because
a status of common descent stands in the background' And this difference provides social traction for people like the land

Particularly heated disputes can arise when a person claims to have been given access, through ancestral mediation, to sacred sites, narratives, and designs previously unknown. Fred Myers, for instance, has described how, among
the Pintupi he worked with in central Australia, dreams about ancestral beings offer "enormous interpretive possibilities."
3T

The setting, components, and texts of the dream may provide new important insight into the geontolog but they may also

comissioner who need some distinction to oPerate the legal

machinery of the politics of cultural difference' Individuals may choose to id'entify as indigenous, but the fa'c of their descent transforms this choice of identification into merely

the question of whether or not someone wishes to activate

what is always already there. The lack of choice in the domain

of genealogical classifrcation effectively mirrors thick public presumptions about culture as determination'36
The land commissioner and Rose were discussing a situation in which the only aspect of mutuality defining the group
was descent. But, even when thick ties of social and cultural cohesion are clear! present

"just a dream." These interpretive possibilities can then be mobilized for political and social gain within a community.3s In the northwest coast where I have lived, part of this struggle pivots around individual skills and capacities: the reputation for "cleverness" that a person can acquire by discerning actual, but as yet not cognitively or visually articulated patterns of kinship and geonbe "nothing." They may be
tology.3e "Cleverness" in this context refers not to the creative

capacity to pull into the plane of existence new

forms-it

is

not an existential form of freedom--but to pull into the plane

within

a descent group, disputes

of human epistemology forms and patterns not yet known but already existing.ao Rather than its abrogation, human ingenuity is deeply integrated into the ways that humans encounter the geontology. Indeed, the absence of a clever person and

about what is or is not something do not end. The social cohesion merely helps to shape how disputes will proceed' After all, who is a knowledgeable elder and on what grounds is the
assessment being made? What was the mode of

tutelage-

his or her ability to discern the immanent patterns of

the geontological world is a sorce of much anxiety for small

ritual? Ritual of what sort? Hunting? Song acquisition? These questions and others continually shape t!e center and edges, the content and form, of what is considered to be proper!

indigenous communities which, without such a person, are

blind to the forces ofthis geontological world.

Radical faeries find themselves on the opposite side of this discursively constructed difference between aggregated individuals of choice and the mass subject of genealogical deter-

it is restricted to this mode of address, is not necessarily built out of an exercise of freedom in the liberal sense-agents choosing what to call home. It is a modern prince, a "concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will."az However, these

mination, and not simply because members of this group do not always physica! reproduce- Insofar as they constitute
a counter-public, radical faeries seem to be an epiphenome-

non of the social imaginary of a public, rathe than the social imaginary of kinship, race, and the reproductive family' What

counter-publics are not organized simply by the articulatory power of addressivity. In some permanent radical faerie sanctuaries, housing is determined by the longevity of residence,
a

exactly "a public" is, where

il is' or how it

emerged histori-

ca!

is, of course, a matter of much, and strenuous, debate'

If

we narrow our focus to this particular public, then I

think the

material sense of commitment and belonging. People often spend years living in a tent before a room opens in a more permanent structure. Other people may move more quickly

description that Michael Warner gives of public and counterpublic is quite useful. The counter-public of radical faeries exists by virtue of,members feeling addressed by a set of circulating media that explicitly posit this public as an alternative to the normative dimensions of public life' It would cease to
exist as a living body the moment no one felt addressed'al In other words, radical faeries constitute themselves as a social group by identifying with a specifrc kind and set of cir-

into such permanent structures if they become lovers with someone already living there. At this point the semantic distinction between contestation and creativity seems extremely relevant to the difference attributed to radical faeries and indigenous Australians, at
least at the extremes of their social types. Why does contest-

ing whether someone has in fact encountered a Dreaming, when sharing a presupposition about the truth of Dreaming,
seem distinct from contesting whether someone is in fact pro-

culating texts dnd practices. These circulating media never address anyone in his or her particularity' On the contrar
the texts are constructed to address a wide range of strangers, even though many people writing and reading them may be close friends and lovers and even though many members of

gressive or magical, when sharing a presupposition about the

truth of progress and magic? Both are instances of contestation, but whether they are instances of creativity depends on the framework one brings to bear on time, form, and destination. They depend on the relevance of questions such as: Do the forms stay consistent over time? Are innovations in producing these forms oriented toward changing them or keeping them consistent? Are some indigenous men and women changing certain aspects of their ritual practice in order to

this counter-public are more than happy to restrict access to specific public eventsto those membes of this counter-public whom they consider "just so-" (The theme of an exclusive dinner party during the May Day party ironically signaled just this.) For all this, the counter-public ofradical faeries, even if

maintain them in a changing colonial context? Are some radical faeries maintaining certain aspects of their general ideology of spirituality in order to allow for self-transformative
practices?

Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof").4 ln ReynoLds, the United States Supreme Court found that the government could regulate marriage forms that -by implication, sex acts-even though it also stated civiin "most marriage was sacred "from its very nature"
lized nations." Subsequent cases before the Supreme Court
that probed the relationship between religious beliefs and actions and government regulation did not focus on sex or sexuality per se. In Shcrbert a. Venwr (tS6g), the Supreme Court
heard the case ofa Seventh-day Adventist who was denied un145

Four Even if the interpretive and material status of

a

text artifact in

indigenous communities may never be closed, this does not stop the law and publicfrom demanding textual closure and a

144

genealogical difference as the basis not merely for the recognition of the worth of a culture (note, not necessarily for the
people within that culture) but for the granting oflegal rights

to engage in ceftain kinds of social, cultural, corporeal, and religious practices- No matter the actual dynamic between the form of an artifact and the norms for producing it, law
and public may well demand that a text artifact appear stable,

employment benefrts because she refused to work on Saturdays, the Sabbath of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The Supreme Court held that, although the government did not
have the constitutional

right to punish religious beliefs, it did have the right to regulate "overt acts." But this regulation
was conditioned. The Supreme Court also found that the gov-

unified, and essential and past-oriented ather than futureoriented, for specifrc kinds of rights and values to accumulate around them.a3 This seems especially true in cases of sexual and religious difference.

ernment had to show a "compelling state interest" in legislation that accidenta! or purposely adversely affected a specific religion

In the landmark decision Employment Diaion a' Snith

(r99o), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it would no longer hold the government to the standard of heightened scrutiny if a law only accidentally affected a religious practice. fn Srnith,

The first thing to note is that, no matter the truth of Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini's argument that "specifically Christian ideas about sexual morality" inform most
Supreme Court cases touching on sexualit Reynold"s a' th'e (Jnited Srles (rB7B) is the only case that the United States Supreme Court has heard in which plaintiffs were seeking to
establish their constitutional rights to engage in nonnormative sex acts under the Fee Exercise Clause of the First

the court reviewed whether or not two Native Americans, Alfred Smith and Galen Black, could be denied unemployment beneflts after testing positive for the Schedule r drug
peyote they used during a Native American Church service.as

While iterating the constitutional distinction between belief

and action, Justi'ce Antonin Scalia's majority decision stated, "W'e have never held that an individual's religious beliefs ex-

The struggle to protect the religious use of peyote and ayahuasca from criminalization does not merely pivot on the difference between belief and action, but on the differences be-

him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate' ' ' ' The
cuse

tween the people

acting-a

mass or cultural subject; a free

mere possession of religious convictions which contradict the relevant concerns ofa political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities'" Citing Reynoli,s, Scalia argued that a person could not excuse a

or constrained subject. The establishment of the religious ex-

emption for peyote use in the Native American Church and later for marijuana use in the Rastafarian religion rested on
the understanding that these practices were essential compo-

criminal practice on the basis of religion' "To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious beIief superior to the law of the land, and in effect lo permit every citizen to become a law unto himself'" The threat of
anarch Scalia argued, must at times expose democracy to the prejudice of the majority. "'The Court today suggests that the disfavoring of minority religions is an 'unavoidable consequence' under our system of government and that accommodation of such religions must be left to the political
process." It is no little irony that, in cases pertaining to homo-

nents of long-standing, stable, and distinctive religious cul-

tural traditions. These religions were not recently invented, individually authored, or under constant revision. They were genealogical. Not surprisingly, a penumbra of race hovers
over these religious practices and their belief structures. The descent of persons and the descent of beliefs are

tightly ar-

ticulated.

In tlS.

a. Robert Lawrence

Boyll $99r), the U.S. District

sexuality and abortion rights, Scalia has foregrounded the religious roots of his oPinions. Smithled. to the creation of a coalition to lobby for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993, which, when signed by President Clinton on r7 November r9J, restored the compelling-interest test and ensured its application in all cases where religious exercise was substantially burdened' On z5 June rgg7, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional because it forced states to go beyond the religious protections guaranteed by the First Amendment as
these had been interpreted in Smith.a6

Court for the District of New Mexico was asked to decide whether Boyll should have been indicted for unlawfully importing and distributing peyote for use in the Native American Church. ChiefFederal Judge Juan Burciaga began with an

observation that the "war on drugs" had tattered the "Fourth

Amendment right to be free from uneasonable searches and

frail Fifth Amendment right against selfincrimination or deprivation of liberty without due process" and threatened "the First Amendment right to freely exercise one's religion." He then signaled his view of the spirit of
seizures and the now the law in the context of a multicultural society: "To us in the

Southwest, this freedom ofreligion has singular significance

because

it

affects diverse cultures. . . . To the Government,

Boyll' peypeyote is a dangerous hallucinogen' To Robert to his religion'" ote is both a sacrament and a deity essential

the United States to Indians because of their status as Indians." This congressional act did not, however, clarify how an earlier regulatory exemption should be interpreted. In r97o, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Administration (oue), had

protection did The federal government argued that religious not be considered not apply to Boyll-that peyote use could the Uniformed ,eligiorrs from a legal point of view-because racial designation' Control Substance Act (r99o) relied on a recognized Native Americans were exempted' Only federa! 25 percent Native Because neither Boyll nor his wife was

already exempted "the nondrug use of peyote

in bona fide

religious ceremonies of the Native American Church, and members of the Native American Church" from Schedule r
prosecution. Judge Gary D. Stott, who heard the case of Snte of Uth a. Mooney, noted that the pre had subsequently decided to interpret this exemption as applicable only to mem-

Americanoramemberofafederal!recognizedtribe'theex-

rejected this arguemption did not apply to them'a? Burciaga of believers and ment. "Church" for him referred "to a body of a formal their shared practices, rather than the existence the Native in stmcture or a membership roll"' Membership of one,s beliefs American Church derived from the sincerity recognized and participation in rituals, not from a federally
appealed Burciaga's bloo qrrarrtrrm. The federal government panel of three .rrlitg in the roth Federal Circuit Court' but a

bers of federally recognized Native American tribes. And Wilhelm Murg, writing for the Natiae Amnri,canTimcs,nored
that in December zoor, the DEA's Deputy Assistant Administration for the Office of Diversion Control, Laura Nagel, had referred to a department decision to "delete all references to the'Native Ameican Church'and to'members of the Native

judges uPheld his decision'

of Utha' Moorcy The Utah Supreme Court heard ttre Snte

American Church'in the regulation." The oe,l "would then add language identical to the language used in rnre that protects the use of peyote by members of federa! recognized

in

to the religious use of peyote had changed' Amendments had been added in American Indian Religious Freedom Act possessron' rgg4rhat,on the one hand, made lawful the use' frde tradi"bona for and transportation ofpeyote by an Indian

regarding the zoo4. By that time the legislative climate

tribes for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of taditional Indian Religion."
These legislative and regulatory changes allowed the State

ofUtah to arge that Stott should defer to the interpretation

of the oe . and rule that the Mooneys were not entitled to the

with the practice of tional ceremonial purposes in connection on the other hand' defined a traditional Indian religion" and, ..any tribe, band, nation, pueblo, or an Indian as a member of which is other organized group or community of Indians ' ' ' by special programs and services provided
recognized for the

protection of any exemption for the religious use of peyote

because they lacked the government seal of recognition. The State of Utah also argued that the restriction of the exemption
to federally recognized Native American tribes, rather than to

Church' did not violate members of theNative American Protection Clause because it Fourteenth Amendment Equal rather than a racial or religious was a political designation than preserve tribal culture' rather
designation, "designed to
a

the

this preservation of "tribal culture" is not intended to make for culture equal to established religions or to provide a space of social experiment and self-elaboration' The preservation tribal culture through the exemption of members to charges

Utah's Controlled Subjected these arguments' Interpreting federal exemptions-those under stances Act under the two regulatory exrn Amendments and those under the

constitutiona!

Stott resuspect racial preference'" Judge

in under federal drug law, where drugs become "nondrugs" tribal culture both a religious transubstantiation' writes into this catholic reading of materiality and a Protestant reading adminisof the mature subject of salvation' Drugs cannot be
tered to children or to anyone else forcefuIly' Such administration of drugs transfrgures religion into child abuse' These court cases do not, of course, describe what people to actual! do. Courts may uphold the rights of governments of regulate actions, but they do not compel the various levels Utah government to act. For instance, many communities in

the

had a constituemption-Stott decided that the Mooneys Stott's use peyote in their religious services'

150

tional right to federal law' the use ruling does not answer whether' under as members of a fedof peyote by persons not recognized Currently' the r""o*nized tribe should be permitted'

"r"1lr whether the O CenSrrpr"*" Court is being asked to decide Vegetal' the U'S' branch tro Esprita Benefrciente Unio do group' should be allowed to import
of a Brazilian Christian
ceremonles.

of and elsewhere openly practice polygamy as a manifestation cities' their religious belief. In many other forests, towns' and
spiritumen, women, and transgendered persons engage in ally inspired practices of drug ingestion formally proscribed perby law. Many of these men, women, and transgendered
and fedsons seek to exploit the incommensurability of state

and use ayahuasca, another Schedule

r drug' in its religious

the exemption ap-

In the end, the Utah court ruled that American Church irreplied to all members of the Native judgments and regu.p""tirr" of racial identity' Several other in this religious practice are interesting
latory decisions on
a radical ."g"rd, including the tax status of Nomenus'

eral law, and the regulatory language that surrounds

it'

to

faerie

further their religious practice' Nevertheless, these legally intersanctioned governmental powers are part of a broader
national regime of recognition that apprehends religion and and corporeality through the grids ofthe autological subject
the genealogical societY.

sanctuary in Oregon?

not-for-profrt religious organizarion' of George W' Bush' Nevertheless, under the administration committed to tightening the the Justice Department remains inheritance (race) and symrelationship between corporeal in order to restrict the bolic inheritance (religious customs)
as a

No elaborate jurisprudence on indigenous ritual drug ingestion exists in Australia, in large part because statenot a part regulated drugs were not and, for the most part' are

for criminally defined acts' The scope of religious exemptrons

of "customary" practice.as The Australian state does, however, actively regulate other aspects of ritual practices where these practices touch the criminal code. In a series of decisions, Commonwealth, state, and Territory courts have found

occupy their traditional lands in accordance with thei tradi-

tional laws and customs. Olney cited the very language of the Mbo decision that recognized native title in order to nullify
its effects in this case. "The tide ofhistory has indeed washed
away any real acknowledgement of their traditional laws and

that many practices considered to be related to traditional ritual life, or to be a necessary correlative to cultural life, are
not protected from the criminal code: classic examples are the

any real observance of their taditional customs." The FuIl Fedeal Court upheld Olney's judgment, stating, "the Yorta

customary marriage of pre-adolescents, ritual punishment, and honor killings.ae At the same time, High Court decisions
152

Yorta community had lost its character as a traditional Aboriginal community." In his minority dissent, Blackburn argued that Justice Olney was in error for having applied too

(tggr), which recognized native title, have narrowed the basis ofwhat can be considered an example of"traditional culture." To be considered an artifact ofa traditional culture, objects, people, or practices must show significant continuity in their form over time. This status includes the
since Mabo

restrictive an approach to the concept ofwhat is "traditional"

and for having failed to take seriously much of the oral evidence provided by the claimants. The Yorta Yorta submitted
an application to the High Court to appeal this second ruling.

153

external form and the normative social protocols for producing this form. A social group must maintain this form even as

In December 2oo2, the High Court upheld Olney and the

Full Federal Court.
Olney based his decision on
a

local, state, and comrrionwealth statutory and common laws and regulatory regirrgs are evacuating the legal and social incentives for doing so.so

simple comparison of the disa

couises and texts of contemporary Yorta Yorta claimants and the written record of Edward Curr, pastoralist and amateur ethnographer who lived in the region in the rB5os. Olriey focused on the issue of whether the normative protocols under-

TheYortaYorta native title application provides a good example of how restrictive the juridical imaginary of the "tradi-

tional"

can be. The application was lodged in FebruarY 1994,

lying the Yorta Yorta attachment to land had fundamentally

shifted.s'zHis answer was yes. He argued that the language and

covering an area along the Murray River in southeastern Australia. The hearing began in :996, but concluded after the re-

beliefs of the claimants placed them closer to the Friends of

strictive Native Title Act amendments were passed in r998-5r Later that same year, Justice Olney determined that native

the Earth, who put in a supporting brief, than to their own

ancestors, as recorded by Curr. The Yorta Yorta had entered

title did not exist over the land and waters claimed by the
Yorta Yorta. He concluded that before the end of the nineteenth century the ancestors of the Yorta Yorta had ceased to

the New Age which meant, for Olney, that they had departed

their proper Age. As Lisa Strelein has argued, Olney's reliance on the survival of a pre-contact normative system im-

ported two additional criteria into the usual understanding oftradition: that traditions have what she calls "an age" and
what I call

munity's verbal life.'e Other folk theorists and linguistic anthropologists have recounted the incredible ability of Amazonian shamans to repeat without deviation poetica! complex, esoteric texts. That said, not all scholars of the verbal arts examine the iterative nature of postcolonial poetics from the point of view of the domi4ation of speech form over speech event and iteration over innovation. Many examine instead the creative interplay between text artifact and interactional
norms.ss But this point of view is loudly rejected in law as well
as

temporal orientation, and that society be reduced to its normative features.ss To satisfy the criteria of native title, indigenous applicants must not merely produce text
a

artifacts (objects, bodily habitus, songs) that resemble those documented in the history books, they must also produce them on the basis of the same normative protocols of their

154

of pre-contact ancestors. These ever-multiplying conditions cultural subjectifrcation sit side-by-side with other bodies of Iaw that criminalize the practices and nomative attitudes that Curr described-ritual sex, gender subordination' preactually adolescent marriage-whether or not these practices existed or were mediated through the fevered mind of Curr
himself. The Yorta Yorta are, by law, already in the New Age'

in popular culture.

In the shadow of this case law, what avenues ae available for radical faeries to legitimate their practices where they
touch

criminal code? Cast outside genealogy by critical publics and juridical rulings, faeries fall back, or are pushed,
a

Olney did not pull his understanding of tradition from thin air. A certain representational gravity pulled him there'

into the disciplines of freedom-but a severely gualifred freedom. Read under the sign of "homosexual," radical faeries are barely equal citizens unde the law. Understood as a religion, they straddle precariously the divide between the autological subject and genealogical society- Radical faeries seem
to be free, but they are then refused their freedom an refused
a

Within the anthropological community, much ink has been spilled in academic debates concerning the normative orientation and the actual capacity of so-called oral cultures to reproduce long ancestral texts over great expanses of time'
Tzvetan Todorov famously argued, in The Con4u'est of Amnr-

proper "culture" in any deep (i-e., historical) or robust (socially governed) sense. Indigenous people face the opposite
side of this discursive dynamic. They may be seen to have cul-

by heart, without individual variation' ' ' ' Even if we suppose that these informants, doubtless old men, exaggerate the importance of ritual discourse to the detriment of improvised speech, we cannot help being impressed by the number and and length of such discourses [such as the Popul Vuh] comhence by the place ritual occupies at the heart of the

i'ca,thatsuchsacredtextsastheheuhuetlatolliwere..learned

ture in the robustly genealogical sense-biologicall sociall and culturally descendent-but they're not "free." Lacking freedom, they teeter on the rim of humanity. It is not a surprise, then, that media and legal discussions revolve around

how far their toes can dip into actual life before they lose
whatever social, political, or economic compensations refus-

ing actual life might provide them. Nor is it a surprise that media and legal discussions of progressive alternative social
groups revolve around the ethics and legality ofappropriating other cultures, given the insistence these alternative groups

the revitalization ofsocial and constitutionally protected free-

doms-or, for Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir, the practice

of freedom as such. The play of sexuality among the radical faeries would seem to exemplify what Foucault had in mind when he reflected

be culturally stillborn and indigenous groups be culturally frozen.

Five

on practices of freedom as practices of critical transgression. One of his favorite rallying cries, "Develop your legitimate strangeness," could, after all, have been the banner of various queer hippie communes in the Bay Area during the The Cockettes, its founder, Hibiscus, and the communal movement they helped foster seem to embody Foucault's musings on the politics of self-fashioning. And the visual legacies of these movements-films, writings, sartor97os.s

Perhaps we should be surprised, then, that the social foma-

tions that least fit the state, legal, and public imaginary of
the clean division between the autological state and the genealogical society, between individual freedom and social coercion, are ideal examples of what makes constitutional democracies so exceptional.

It is, supposedly, exactly the freedom

rial styles-provide an ongoing archive for some faerie salons. Many ofthe cultural and spiritual predecessors ofthe radical
faerie movement had died, disbanded, moved, or moved on to far less transgressive lives by the time Foucault arrived in

of the radical faeries from social constraint-even as the law criminalizes them-that makes them good to think through

for those theorists interested in the exceptionalism of constitutional freedom. The arts of the self practiced by radical faeries and by indigenous people struggling to frnd a discipline of the self in the wake of settler colonialism are a part of what Jrgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and Hakim Bey, for all their varying rhetorical styles, conceptual foundations,
and disciplinary locations, tried to comprehend through the notions of unregulated public spheres, practices of the self,
and temporary autonomous zones. A fascinating convergence

in tg75 to lecture in the French Department at the University of California, Berkele and discovered the thriving s/ru culture in the city.s? To be sure, not all adical faeries, nor all queers, share the Foucauldian emphasis on
San Francisco

self-elaboration. Some within the radical faerie movement re-

ject outright the constructionist attitude exemplified in Foucault's genealogical method, seeking instead to frnd a "berdache

spirituality" that defines the essential difference ofgay

men. Fo them, the orientation of radical faeries is not to an

event horizon, but to the reestablishment of a severed spiri-

of interest among theorists of such divergent perspectives,

rhetorics, and disciplinary locations emerges about the potential that counter-publics such
as

tual genealogy.

the radical faeries present for

Although individual radical faeries may disagree with

Foucault's'approach,
States

it

was exactly the possibility

he witnessed

of self-

He was primarily interested in a politics of endless transgres-

transformation among the gay lives

in the United

sion rather than in a politics of repression or translation. In this wa Foucault sounds remarkably like his contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that freedom is the treatment of every. goal as both a destination and a point of departure.se

in the r97os that influenced Foucault's late medita-

tions on the practices of sexual freedom. Insistently driving into the thicket of social life's material and discursive conditions, he sought not a new collective bargaining agreement

to extend rights to new communities and identities, but to interrogate the limits of each and every such bargain. How do we make things that are in realit though not a part of knowledge, acunl? How do we invest actualities that operate just outside vision with the power to change dominant bio-epistemologies? For Foucault, the answer lay in cultivating practices offreedom that orient the subject to restless ex-

Even radical faeries who would support a general Foucauldian perspective are, arguabl neithe the most radical
nor the most conservative among gay, lesbian, and queer pub-

Iics and counter-publics.

In its broader social context

the

world-making orientation of many faeries is quite diferent,

for example, from the world-negating sexual experimentation of writers such

as Jean

Genet-or at least from Leo Ber-

perimentation with the givenness of life, with how life might

sani's reading of Genet. Bersani argues that Genet's vision

is-otherwise regimented, otherwise habituated, otherwise unremarkable. These "games of truth"

be otherwise than it

are densely deictic, organized around specific temporal and spatial questions. Why am I governed lihe th ruther than like

that, here and no*? Why is it l organization of sexual pleasure, eroticism, amour, that constitutes the relationship between myself and myself, and myself and others, rather than some other?s8

in order to imagine "a form of revolt that has no relation whatsoever to the laws, categories, and values it would contest and, ideall destroy." This nonrelational ethics allows Genet to be radically alone, and absolutely distinguishes him from "the tame demand for recognition on the part of our own gay community."0o It course,
refuses "relationality" Genet's vision of self-shattering, accomplished through a spe-

cific organization and orientation of faceless bodies, exactly

was not interested in sexual free-

In other words, Foucault

presupposed the sanctifrcalion

of.

entre nous as a form ofrec-

dom's secret mening, or in sexual freedom in the abstract, or as an abstraction that represented the end of historya state in which the self experiences a radical and ultimate break from all social determinations-or in freedom in the abstract-a state in which the self experiences the jouissance

ognition that passes most profoundly and fundamentally between two people nakedly facing each other, no social status

or superficiality of flesh standing between this embrace of

eyes

and souls.

If

radical faeries stand diagonal to an anti-communal

ofthe collective suture

or the return to the bare naked body.

deployment of corporealit they likewise stand awkwardly

alongside a domesticating homosexuality that calls for recog-

subcultural publics having fluid temporal, social and substan-

nition by institutions of state and civil society on the basis of the essential sameness of gay and straight people. For
many self-identified heterosexuals and homosexuals, a person's sexuality does not necessitate alternative forms of spiri-

tial boundaries" such as faerie gatherings and the variety of

sub-cultural styles such as Wiccans, radical vegans, and anarchist jugglers they draw in-provide much of the creative
energy of regulated public spheres.63 Many of the residents of

tuality found in other worlds, but can be richly accommodated and explained by the traditions of the book.ut H"y
certainly knew that many gay men and lesbians understood
themselves to be Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. It was exactly

radical faerie communities, for instance, travel to other alternative communities to sample arts of living otherwise, includ-

ing communes of radical clowns, sites where ayahuasca can

be

ritually taken, ashrams, alternative housing movements,

this "assimilationist" tendency that putatively prompted him

independent newspaper collectives, and organic/vegan food cooperatives. Though Habermas insists that these kinds of

to establish the radical faeies in the first place. According to Ha as well as queer feminists such as Lisa Duggan, the demand that state benefits, propefty rights, and social recognition be
extend,ed,

publics are possible only within a framework guaranteed

by a democratic constitutionalism, nevertheless, unregulated

to homosexuals is seen as opposed to

public spheres "develop more or less spontaneously."e Insofar

as

demand that the very nature of these institutions be trans-

they are at least semi-autonomous to the field of disci-

formed by the multiple forms of desire and association that

queer life makes possible. Hay and Duggan may part company over the question of identity essentialism. They share,
however, a worry about the extensionalist, rather than trans-

pline within the regulated public sphere, unregulated public

spheres provide a context for creative discovery. "New prob-

lems can be perceived more sensitively, discourses aimed at achieving self-understanding can be conducted more widely
and expressively, collective identities and need interpretation

formative, nature of the contemporary liberal politics of recognition. I put "assimilationist" in quotes because, for many who oppose homosexuality, gays and lesbians cannot be itself being radically transformed.62
as-

with fewer compulsions than is the procedurally regulated public spheres." 5

can be articulated

case

in

similated into the dominant national culture without culture

Although Foucault foregrounded the conjunction between

practices of life and the organization of power,

it

was Haber-

The social implications of practices of self-elaboration,

counter-publicness, and the techniques of freedom and coer-

mas who focused particular attention on the problem these

kinds of publics face in the institutionally saturated thickets

of deliberative democacies.66 Some of the contours of Habermas's theory of deliberative democracy are

cion that emerge from them were not merely an interest of

Foucault, but also of his intense intellectual rival, Habermas.

fair! uncontro-

For Habermas, unregulated public spheres-"overlapping

versial. For him, democratic communicative proceduralism

"grounds the presumption that reasonable or fair results are obtained insofar as the flow of relevant information and its

and procedures of democratic constitutionalism, fostering

In this wa practical reason can be freed both from the republican phi
proper handling have not been obstructed."67
losophy of consciousness whose hope for legitimate and just governance rests in the establishment of an ethical citizenry and from the liberal philosophy of interests whose hope for

forms of subjectivit embodiment, and institutionality at odds with them. As a result, unregulated public spheres are
often sites where the state exerts repressive, coercive power. Habermas notes just this, arguing that because of their "anarchic structures," these unregulated spaces are more "vulnerable to the repressive and exclusionary effects of unequally

legitimation and justice rests on the establishment of an ongoing compromise between interest-oriented economic actors.68 As opposed to both republican and liberal philosophy,

distributed social power, structural violence, and systematically disturbed communication."T0 Vulnerability exists not merely because of police force, but because of the force of
sense and nonsense. As

deliberative democracy grounds practical truth

in nothing

Kirstie McClure notes, "the appropri-

more than a constitutionally protected procedure of commu-

nication such that all conclusions that citizens reach and that
have been reached in conformity with the procedures of delib-

oftoleration" of specific social groups assures a "discursive frame within which toleration makes
ateness or desirabiity sense." Many unregulated publics go beyond the conceptual

erative rationalit are reasonable, reason being the ultimate

boundaries of the frame of toleration, "beyond which tolera-

ground of legitimation.6e
Unregulated public spheres pose a particular kind of problem to Haberms's faith in public reason and social justice.

tion appears foreclosed as senseless, as non-sense, in both

principle and practice."71
One doesn't have to travel that far into any alternative pub-

After all, unregulated public spheres do more than creatively energize the normative public sphere. Unregulated public spheres also expose constitutional democracy to the charge
that openness, transparenc and non-coercion never actually

lic to

see

what is at stake. Practitioners ofsocial critique can

exist squarely within the institutionally regulated spheres of

hold in moments of serious difference, difference that matters

public reason and still have to contend with the police function of the regulated public sphere. One of the founders of the Critical Art Ensemble, Steve Kurtz, an art professor at
State University of New York, Buffalo, was investigated by the

challenge exists to normative public life or when the major

edges ofthe challenge have been neutralized. Even where they

that openness and non-coercion exist only when no real

rsr for culturing bacterial forms as part of the cr's performance pieces and faces possible charges under the Patriot Act

are not directly opposed to democratic forms of governance,

for possession of biological agents. The Washington Post reported that Adele Henderson, chair of Kurtz's department,
was among the people the nnI questioned. "On May

from the point of view of normative publics, unregulated pub-

lic spheres may present a robust challenge to the substance

zr,

she

says, the

rsl

asked her about Kurtz's art, his writings, his

books; why his organization (the art ensemble) is listed as a collective rather than by its individual members; how it is funded."72 Two of Kurtz's texts, "Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media" and "Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas," were published by the
same press, Automedia/Semiotext(e), that published the an-

rather than merely in instances of its abuse, becomes especially acute, or at least acutely visible, when the division between the public and the private threatens to be ruptured
by the disciplining of the very creativity that democracy and capital claim to foster. We can assume a robust referent for the

"private," including the domain of the individual, the famil

or a culture. In all ofthese cases, the question is whether, as Habermas puts it, the procedures of deliberative rationality
are themselves neutral and

archist Hakim Bey and other avant-garde fiction and non-

frction writers and French theorists. In short,.unregulated

public spheres can be situated at the crosshairs ofdemocratic
coercion and creativity

impartial, or are merely misused.

165

Does the very fact ofan orientation to public reason act as a

often the sites of social conflict, and this conflict presents a potentially decisive challenge to the exceptionalism of freedom claimed by deliberative democracies.
Many counterpublics practice forms of spirituality that are
a

-the

sources of creative discovery are

type of coercive force?

Habermas says it doesn't, and he tries to demonstrate why by introducing a difference between thematization and coer-

cion; namely, a distinction between "procedural constraints on public discourses" and "constraints or limitations on the
range oftopics open to public discourse."73 Any topic related

panopoly ofreligious, cultural, and social traditions. These

a

practices ofspirituality present

robust challenge to the ideal

account ofthe unregulated public sphere, not merely because

to "ethically relevant questions ofthe good life, ofcollective identity, and ofneed interpretation" should be open to public
discourse. Simply making something the topic of discussion, Habermas argues, does not "yetimply any infringement" on

their beliefs challenge normative beliefs but because their practices are riddled by lowJevel illicit, often criminal activity, the physical and social outcomes of which may not appear redemptive on the surface-high rates of nIv/elos infection, drug addiction, and low life expectancy. The charge
that deliberative democracy is merely
a

the individual, or, we might add, on her cultural elaborations: "To talk about something is not necessarily the same as meddling in another's affairs."7a Many critics of Habermas's approach to deliberative democracy have focused on the problem of deflning "ethically relevant questions of the
good life."?s To these critics, Habermas has replied that such

liberal mode of social

coercion would annul one of its differences in the competitive field of governmental forms. Democratic freedom would merely be one of
a

number of competing forms of social coer-

cion. For Habermas, the possibility that social coercion may

be secreted in the very heart of deliberative proceduralism,

defrnitions are the outcome of ongoing coordinating and integrating processes of public reason. I think this is true enough, and so

I want to turn instead to the stakes ofthe distinction

between thematization and coercion in the everyday worlds in

The Rhea County vote would certainly fall on the coercive

side of the division Habermas posits between thematization

which the gourd and shells were made.

To this end, let us return to the New York dance

part

held during the week following the Beltane May Day celebration. Remember, what made the party interesting, even magical, to some people was the way in which it was able to
remove itself from the quotidian connection between sexual
tokens and types. Some partyers thought it was moving not to

and coercion. The commissioners went far beyond merely opening to public discourse an "ethically televant" question

"ofthe good life, ofcollective identity, and ofneed interpretation." Indeed, their strategy was intended to discourage public discussion. Even if the commission had gotten its wa it would have faced problems enforcing the ordinance. Before
race and sexuality can be regulated, the subject must be disci-

know who was a token of what, i.e., what was something and what was nothing. But, however much the party/ritual was
able to constitute a spiritual realm by removing itself from

plined to inhabit that race and sexuality. The immanent play of discourse around bodies and their circulations, invaginations, and refigurations must be appropriated violently or sur-

the sexually quotidian, the quotidian nature of sexual politics was not fa afreld; moreover, the force of these quotidian sexual politics provided some ofthe critical social energy of the party itself. As the dancers danced, the country was debating the social meanings and ramifications of nance banning gays.
a

reptitiously in such a way that a play without an essential meaning is given a direction.?? In other words, race and sexuality need to become meaningfuI, vital, foci of social life.
U.S. racial regulations, a genealogical fantasy bears much of this disciplinary weight. Discourses about the ma-

county ordi-

In

In the weeks leading up to the gather-

ing, commissioners in nearby Rhea Count Tennessee, had

passed a resolution banning gays and lesbians from residence.

teriality of genealogy (race, ethnicity, sex) frgure the truth

of the body and its reproduction as simultaneously escaping
and leading social and individual sovereignty.Ts In some cases,

The ban did not merely criminalize homosexual acts or ban

homosexual marriage.

It

made

it illegal for anyone who

was

identified as a homosexual to live in the county.76 The reso-

racial classifrcation was determined by a "one drop" rule.Te In other cases, such as recent U.S. census regulations, individuals are allowed to choose among various governmentally stipulated races, in effect opening race, if only slightly, to the agency ofthe autological subject. In still other cases, the racialization of populations may directly challenge the status ofstate sovereignt
as is

lution was quickly rescinded. Former county executive and

clerk Jimmy Wilkey claimed the media had misrepresented the discussion, asserting that the commissioners had merely
voted to ban gay marriage. The expulsion of a class of people
based on their social classification and worded in such a way
as

the case with indigenous populations

to avoid judicial scrutiny raised the specter of the violently

segregated Jim Crow South, if not the soft racial segregation

in settler nations, or challenge the moral legacy ofthat state, as in the case with slavery in the United States.

of neighborhoods throughout the United States.

In sexual regulation, the disciplinary weight is split

be-

tween the fantasy of the autological subject and the materiality and symbolics of genealog between discourses of the sexual self as the outcome of a set of sovereign acts and the sexual self as determineC by some aspect of the body (desire,
genes, the brain). This way of examining sexual regulation is

sexual are questions that potentially diverge, converge, and

tense up.

These practical problems open Habermas's proposal to far deeper conceptual problems. The Rhea County proposal was

somewhat different than Janet Halley's

reading of the judi

certainly shocking for some, and certainly aimed to mobilize the coercive and disciplinary policing function of the state be!re engagtng the public in a critical rational debate. But the thematizations subtending this surprising governmental
action are not extraordinary events. They are the very stuffof how we go about the day. If we treat sexuality and race as if they were the gourd and shells sitting on my desk, the problem becomes quite clear. What is and is not "something" can be a matter of serious dispute, animating heated debates not onlyabout the social status ofa thing (akind ofperson, object, mood), but also about what should be the evidential grounds
for assessing competing claims about the status of a thing (an

cial logic of homosexual sodomy as presented in the majority opinion of Bowers a. Hardntick, in which, she argues, sexual

regulation is maintained by an "equivocal reference.to identities and/or acts."8o Nevertheless, sexual regulation can appear to be operating on the analogy of the one-drop

rule-the

homosexual act substituting for the droplet of blood. Locating

the truth of sexuality in the act, however, confronts another set of iterative problems. Who did it? What did they do?
When? Perhaps

ironicall the homosexuals

easiest to regu-

Iate under the proposed Rhea County resolution may well have been those who organize their public and private lives

act,

identit heritage). But these

decisions about who and

on the basis of the normative fantasy of heteosexual mo-

nogamy-men and men, or women and women, who live in

committed or proximate relationship to each other. Perhaps

what are an instance of one thing rather than another are also the covert presuppositions that allow us to go about our daily

this was what worried some social conservatives: that these

committed gay partners provided evidence that there was no moral or cultural difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples. Even so, as Halley notes, when pushed too
hard, the homosexual and the heterosexual
as a

routines without much thought. In other words, thematizations are not restricted to instances of extraordinary, strongly glossed, normative statements. The problem is not simply
that ethically relevant questions of the good life, of iollective identit and of the interpretation of need shnull, be open to

cluster ofacts

becomes merely a tendency, a probability manifesting over the long run. This fundamental psychic, physical, and practical indeterminacy constitutes sexual identity as a potentia!

public discourse, but that at every scale of interaction these questions are cnnlly being asked and some response is demanded just to know whom to ask for a cup of coffee, which pronoun to use, which adjectives might refer to a person in a crowd. In other words, the problems are not only at the level

paranoid structure. Are you or have you ever been a homo-

of such things as "spousal abuse" and

"po!amy." Nor is the

a

counter-discursive input by them. The obvious problem here

is that whatever legislation emerges is based on a discursive

problem the manner with which

form lends itself to

trans-

lational compromise. Nor, finall is the problem confined to determining when exactly a thematization becomes a regula-

horizon that did not include those being discussed. They will
nevertheless be subjected to the police function of the state. Of course, many people may well wish to participate but cannot because the regulatory regime has closed the door on their perspectives.sr Some people actively engage public thematizations of their

tion; or how large the interval between yet and rnw has to
before coercion can be said to enter the scene.

be

Not surprisingl counter-publics, unregulated public

spheres, and minority and subaltern individuals and groups have extensively reflected on how the inherently stipulative
17tJ

life worlds. They may think there is something demeaning

about having to say

nature of intimate, state, and public thematization should be confronted. Their answers are multiple. Some people are
ignorant of how images of them are being circulated region-

wh though their practices appear repug-

nant to the legislative and moral

majority-or at least,

the

legislative and moral group that holds the keys to the instruments of political legislation-they are nonetheless worthy of tolerance and recognition. But they engage in these conversations anyway in order to steer the public conversations
and their reflguration of the background conditions of casual

all nationall

and transnationally. This ignorance is not conas

fined to remote, unplugged regions commonly imagined

existing in the undeveloped Third and Fourth worlds, but in

media-sawy centers. Other people actively ignore how their

lives and life-worlds are represented. They refuse

to

engage

conversations and economic dispensations that result from

one way of thematizing rather than another. Who counts as
a homosexual, a faerie, a heterosexual, indigenous, woman)

in such conversations, perhaps because they do not

see

their

practices as open to discussion. They might have various reasons for this refusal, not least of which would be a profound

from the point of view of states' rights, interactional dynamics, and economic address? For whom do these various constructions of homosexualit indigeneity, and femininity count? On what social grounds are these differences built?
These politics of engagement often take quite seriously the

skepticism about the relationship between the themes and aims of the conversation. They might think that, although
thematized
as a

moral issue, debates about gay marriage in the

United States have nothing to do with homosexuality but are

poll-driving issues meant to get a person into offrce who will

help radically transform the tax code and the Social Security system. For whatever reason, they absent themselves from
any role in steering public discussions about their way of life.

manner in which unequal social and media power direct how

social identities are commensurated, coordinated, and trans-

lated across the public sphere and into civil society.

Finall many

people within counter-publics, unregulated

The discussion proceeds around them without any signifrcant

public spheres, and minority and subaltern groups neither

to thematize/translate their practices and beliefs for a normative public; they neither ignore
the integrating function of stipulating thematizations nor do they engage them in the sense of translating thei life-worlds

engage nor ignore the call

rzs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves-because they never intersected with the Spectral, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of Simulation."s2
Because rAzs are not sites of revolution but sites of insurrection and uprising, they are not oriented toward establishing new forms of permanence. They seek merely to foster social habitudes "which do not match the expected curve,
the consensus approved trajectory."s3
T,zs

for others. Instead ofthe dialectics ofrecognition and translation, we are witnessing the emergence of a practice of espionage and transfrguration and of an orientation to the reelaboration ofthe selfrather than self-identity. In these social

flelds, the point may well be to reshape habitudes ahead of recognition, to test something out rather than translate it, zot
to produce meanings that can be translated, or embodiments that can be recognized.

are contingent and

impermanent in their very nature: "Life festivals, uprisings

cannot happen every day-otherwise they would not be 'non173

ordinary.' "

84

Bey is perhaps the best-known popular theorist of rhe politics of espionage within these counter-publics. Sounding much like the later Habermas, Bey, for instance celebrates
what he sees as the radical nature of so-called pirate utopias of the eighteenth century-the islands and ports under con-

For Bey, the question of whether to inhabit the

space between fact and norm, and how one actually does this,

demands being comfortable with a life of contingency and impermanence, fostering uprisings and insurrections rather than revolutions and new social permanences, and being at peace with the ebbs and tides that this mode of impermanent
existence entails.

trol of seafaring bandits. For Be these utopias consisted

of semi-permanent enclaves of freedom, what he calls "temporary autonomous zones." Bey claims that whereas pirate utopias existed in the seams between the emergent nationstate and the barbarian coastline, contemporary temporary
autonomous zones (rez) now exist in the space (what he calls

This condition of impermanence is, Bey claims, the source of the power of r.zs rather than their abrogation because the purpose of a rllz is not to establish permanent modes of subjectivity and sociability but to fosrer a "quality of enhancement" that acts like a " 'peak experience'as opposed to the standard of 'ordinary' consciousness and experience . . . [these] moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life, the shaman returns-you cannot stay up on the roof forever-but things have changed, shifts, and integrations have occurred, a difference is made."8s

"the margin oferror") between social "abstactions" and social "reality"; this is also what Habermas refers to as social
norms and. socilfa.cts. "Because the State is concerned pri-

marily with Simulation rather than substance, the .r^z can

'occupy' these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small

Here again the indigenous-the shaman urging us on to

peak experiences and self-elaborations, standing in for and, perhaps, in the way of, the social and carnal complexities of

actua! inhabiting zones of simultaneous hyper-surveillance and utter neglect. Experiments in sociality such as those engaged in by radical faeries are not, however, always as picturesque as the image of a shaman channeling the spirit world
might suggest. They are instead awkward, misfrring, malfunctioning social interactions, blurred moral lines between appropriate cultural borrowings and insensitive appropriations,

The lntimate Event and Genealogical Society

all of which are sometimes, perhaps too often, deformed by

't74

accidental addictions and illnesses. They are the social strategies conceived to deal with the consequences of the party as well as the party. They are the struggles to build houses with-

andall Kenned

out money, to get care without health insurance, to speak a language of dependency when the broader political economy is increasingly oriented to the socially detached conjugal

legal scholar and race theorist who has written extensively on Loaing a.Virginia and its relation to same-sex marriage, has suggested that in matters of love, the issue is the humanity of the person, not the accia

dent of birth or forced enclosure within a social skin'l Thus' when asked in a New York Times interview what role racial' or other social statuses, should play in the organization ofhis children's intimacy, Kennedy said, "I'll say, go into the
own

couple.
To excoriate Bey would be an odd way ofending this essay'

We might instead pause and follow his transubstantiation more closely. Bey makes his "gourd" something by lodging it in two chambers of the shell. One chamber is carved out
by the restricted set ofliberal rights attached to genealogical societies. The other chamber is deeper inside, carved in turn

world and try to flnd good people that feel genuine affection and love for you, and disregard everything else about their background. Love is just such a crucial, wonderful thing' and
if you are

luc!

enough to find somebody who genuinely loves

It is more exit from, than chamber of, humanity' This exit-chamber is discipline and possibility-a site of humanism's disciplinarity and a possible exit from autological
by the first.

you, grab that person and hold on to that person and nothing else matters."2 For Kennedy' love is an intimate event'

It happens to you or it doesn't. If you are luck it happens

is between you and someone else simultaneously' But love not merely an interpersonal event, nor is it merely the site It at which politics has its effects' Love is a political event' expands

humanity.

humanit creating the human by exfoliating its

so-

Lvi-Strauss,'and all others were primitive accumulations or

evolutionary pathways, this normative frame held as tightly

for Europeans as for anyone else. Second, the anxiety over the maintenance of a distinction between the intimate event and the genealogical society as a key way of differentiating
Western and non-Western civilization inflected the notion of

Notes

culture with the quality of hysteria. Durkheim and Mauss would report the special quality of primitive cultural hysteria.87

But

as

all societies came to be seen to have a culture and lntroduction: Empires of Love

a metalanguage of that culture, soon modern subjects were

as

caught in cultural inheritance as their pre-modern projecbecause

tions. The state of European dependency became a problem

in part

it

Forotherapproaches to the intersection ofintimacyand liberalism

see

eliminated the difference between home

Giddens, Thn Trrformnton of Intimacy ; Berlar'll, Intimacy; Wiegman,

and away. The more scholars tried to free the modern subject from inheritance and from the state ofnature-empire, the
more they dragged inheritance deeper into the

"Intimate Publics"; Duggan, Tuilight of Eqwtity; and Gal, 'A Semi

otics of the Public/Private Distinction."

body-uncon-

scious, habitus, doxa. As Deleuze and Guattari have noted, Europeans became absorbed in genealogical trees from kinship to cognition, from the evolution of species to the gram-

z Wittgenstein, On Certainty, zz. 3 E. \ilson, Psychasomatic, zr. 4 Ibd., zz. 5 Ibid.,23. 6 Brian Massumi makes a compatible
and, Schizophrenia.

point in,4

User's Cuid to Captal

mar of language.ss The real difference between the West and

the rest no longer lay in Morgan's famous descriptive and clas-

For diferent trajectories of this legacy, see H alperin, How to Do the H is-

sificatory distinctions, but in the stance people took in relation to their capture by culture. The liberal difference may be

tory of Homosexunlity; Erlbon, Michl Fou.cauh; Sawicki, Disciplining

Fou,cauh; Martin, "Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault."

little more than an agitated reflexivit a wory, and an anxiety ofinfluence. In short, in the wake ofthe law ofgenealog he may find himself neither fully free nor fully constrained, but
instead forced to focus his gaze over his shoulder as he gazes

B 9 ro

Butler, 'Against Proper Objects."

See,

for instance, Navarro, "Experts in Sex Field" and Goode, '.Ce-

tain W'ods."
For example, see Pateman, Thc Sexual Contract; Parker et al., Nationalisms and, Semnlities; Berlant, Th.e Qu.een of Amcrica;
Trouhl,e

\arner,
a

Th.e

simultaneously into the deep recesses of his soul.

with Normnl; Alexande4 "Not Just Anyone Can be Arondekar, "Border/Line Sex."

Citizen";

Stoler, Carnal Krnulzilge and Imperial Power; Mahmoo"' Politics of

Pietyi

an".

'li
ii'
L.

11

of sexuality This said, thee have been a number of excellent studies

9
IO

r and z9-34' Watson, "Aboriginal Laws," see especially paragraphs his field notes' in when' Elkin may have been referring to Maliya A.P. he assigns
Banagiya.

andtransnationalism.Seeforinstance,A.wilson,ThelntmnteEconaWhite Loae;Babb' of Bangkok; Manalansan, Global Diaas;Rafael'

mes Tropics of "Out in Nicaragua"; Patton et al', Qrcer Di'asporos; Quiroga'

"malir" to George Munggulu,

whose patrilineal land was

MaI!

is located

offthe coast ofBanagaiya' Circa 1937' Box

Desire; an"Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelngo'

12 13

See Lewis,

"W. E. B. Du Bois," especia\ 4r'44 and 49-553' and Kaplan, "The Anarchy of Empire'" especially r7r-2a2' origin-ess' studies in diaspora have emphasized exactly the
Recent instance' Axel' "The or origin-obscuring' nature of diaspora' See' for Morocco Diasporic Imaginary"; Roy, "Discovering India"; Edwards'
States PostcoloBound, especially r-28; and Sharpe, "Is the United

II

rB, Elkin Fieldnotes, Sydnev University' woman' She speaks Maggie Timbei seif-identi-fred as a Marritjaben
an Emi speaker' here in Emiyenggal because she considers me is a common way of referring to various indigenous

t2

"Sorry business"

mortuary ceremonres.
13 L4 15

Povinelli, Labor's Lot, especially chapter 3' "Burning the Tnlck'" See, for instance, Fred Myers's classic study, Ethics Alwin Chong, executive officer, Aboriginal Healih Research

238

nial?"

14

implications of Social scientists are now examining the methodological for i:rstance' See' focus' the shift from a comparative to a transnational
Seigel, "BeYond ComPare'"

Committee

of South Australia,

tinna/SECToz/ETH-PROC'HTM'

http://www'flinders'edu'au/koko See also Terri Janke' "Our Cul-

Cultural and Intelture: Our Future: Report on Australian Indigenous and Torres Stait lectual Property Rights," issued by the Aboriginal Islander Commission, http ://www'terrijanke'com'au/fs-topics'htm' an Ethi'cs 'This National Health and Medical Research Council' Valucs Torres Strait and replaced GuidIins on Ethical Matters in Aboriginl but Research, tggt'Independent ofthese new guidelines'
Islnnd Health a Chair within their general spirit, Melbourne University established

1: Rotten Worlds

t6

r z 3 4

Michelmore, "Flesh-eating Bug'" McNeil, "Hundreds of U'S' Troops-"

See, for instance, Jain, InjurY' Faces of Eno Gosdsil, "Remedying Environmental Racism"; estra' Environronmntal Rarm; Park, 'n Examination of International

of Indigenous Health others'

in

2oo4 to which

it appointed Ian Anderson'

For his and Koori man and longtime health activist and researcher' ethics' citical contribution to debates in indigenous health and

mental Racism."

5 6

Centers for Disease Contol and Prevention'

.

..Anthrax','http://www
17

See Pigg,

gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/anthrax-g'htm' "The Credible and the Credulous"; Cohen' iVo Aging in Sufering; Ind'ia;Farmer, Pathologies of Power; Kleinman et al'' Social
cdc.

seel.Anderson,..Ethicallssues'';Reidetal.,TheHealthofAborigirnl Atr;tralia;and Kaplan-Myrth' "Hard Yakka'" Values an Ethics' 5' National Health and Medical Research Council'
Choices"' Kowal ard Paradies, "Ambivalent Helpers and Unhealthy L347'

r8

and Rabinow, Making rca'

7 B

epistemologies For a seminal study of the impact of Western medical on indigenous healing see Re"', Bod'y, Lan'd' an'd' Spirit'
See also My ers, Pintupi Coury'

r9
20

Pintupi Self'and Austin-Broos' "Tivo

2l

DaIy Riuer Lanl, Clairn, Tg-8o' "Casino Roots'" Povinelli, "Consuming Geist'" See also Cattelino' and juridical For discussions of recent legal innovations in sentencing
process see Auty et a., "Koori Court Victoia'"

Laws-"